


The Mad Scientist's Assistant

by neosaiyanangel



Category: Kim Possible (Cartoon)
Genre: Background Relationships, Community: Kim Possible Slash Haven, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Mad Science, More talking, Science, Slice of Life, Talking, genius ditz
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 17:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 40,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11514138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neosaiyanangel/pseuds/neosaiyanangel
Summary: It's been a few months since the Lorwardian invasion and Tara just can't hide her excitement! She got a job at the Middleton Space Center! Hurrah! The only issue is that it's under a crankypants mad scientist who doesn't seem to get what an 'assistant' does. Luckily, Tara's there to help him out!





	1. It Begins

_It was a glorious day in the kingdom._

_The dreaded chaos dragon that had plagued the kingdom was no more. A brave warrior had come forth and he, along with his true companions, had slaughtered it. No longer would it steal any children, demand a tithe, or require constant grooming from the lowly peasants._

_Now the warrior and his troupe were celebrating in the castle with the king, his wards, and his children. A grand banquet set up for the grand guests. Before the food was the dancing, as many of the guests were still filtering in. The princess had been looking for a suitable dance partner, but was stopped in her tracks by the head of the group of heroes, the strong, brave frontline soldier._

_The warrior raised his muscled bicep and flexed, trying to woo the maiden with his machismo. The princess, however, eyed someone else that caught her attention more. Across the room, just entering, was a specimen that most would pass up. The warrior’s friend, some may even venture to call him a sidekick, was scanning the room with curiosity. He was raven-hai_

No, wait. That’s too flowery. And raven-haired? She wasn’t trying to write any of that Sunset day vampire drivel. There was something off with it still besides that… Wait. Muscled bicep? That didn’t make sense! Curse flowers for invading her story! She swiftly replaced ‘muscled bicep’ with ‘arm’ with a few swishes of her pencil.

  _The man’s black hair glistened in the_

 Glistened? Ugh. Bonnie’s bragging about her glistening Adonis was getting to her. She didn’t want to think about the nice yet dull boy that her BFF had managed to hook up with. He was… Well, _plain_. Just like all of the other ‘hotties’ that the blonde had come across when she was on her summer vacations. All of them looked -- and acted -- alike.

 Maybe skipping to the dialogue would be better.

  _“I see that you have just arrived,” the princess noted as he shut the door behind him._

  _“I can see other reasons for why I was just entering the keep... Mayhaps I was peeing in the bushes?” the squire noted drily. “Goodness knows that this castle requires more care than it seems to have been given.”_

  _“Ah yes, I know that_

 Dialogue was going nowhere.

  _Ugh_.

 The blonde chewed on the end of her pencil, staring at the notebook in front of her as she pondered how she could save her fantasy story. She liked the world that she’d developed. The backstory alone would’ve taken fifty pages to get down, but it was solid and deep. She had _no idea_ where to go with any of it, though.

 Maybe she should talk with that one roleplaying group at the comic store about this. They were all into the fantasy stuff a lot more than she was, and she was pretty sure that Larry had mentioned something about writing fanfic-..

 “Miss Blie? Tara Blie?”

 Her head shot up, pale blue eyes settling on the middle-aged man that had called her name. Smiling at his affirmative nod, Tara got up from her seat. She flipped her notepad over to the ‘important notes’ side, making sure to adjust her ‘fancy’ clothes (a nice blouse and a mid-length skirt, both navy blue and the best Coco Banana offered) and readjust the chair she’d been waiting in before she skipped over to him.

 The voice had sounded familiar in a vague way, and his clothes struck a chord with her too. She couldn’t quite place where she had seen him before. The closer she got, the more familiar he looked. She tilted her head and ducked in to peer at his face more closely. So close, in fact, that he took a step back.

 He had short brown hair that was cut into severe angles, making it seem nearly square. The hair on his temples were fading to gray, indicating his age as well as the small lines around his face, the laugh lines being the most prominent. There was something, something she really should know but couldn’t grasp...

 The man cleared his throat and gave a strange-looking smile. He held out his hand as he said, “I’m Dr James Possible, one of the head resear--”

 “Possible!” Tara shouted, slapping herself in the head. Of course! How in the world had she missed that? She didn’t need a phone book to know how rare that last name was. “You’re Kim’s dad!”

 “Erm, yes.” He pulled his hand back and adjusted his tie nervously as he looked around at the other people in the lobby that were now looking at them, again clearing his throat. Apparently trying to switch gears, he guessed, “You and my Kimmie-cub went to school together?”

 “Yup!” she chirped. “She and I were on the cheerleading squad.”

 “Oh right!” Dr Possible snapped his finger and pointed it at Tara. “You’re the one that was at the bottom of the pyramid all the time.”

 “That was me,” Tara affirmed, her smile growing.

 “Hm…” He looked down at his paper and back up at her. “Your papers _did_ say that you were 18, but I didn’t realize… Well, I _thought_ that it was a typo…”

 The blonde blinked several times, a frown tugging at her mouth. “Why did you think that?” she asked with a pout.

 “It says that you have a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology…” the middle-aged man said as if that answered everything.

 “Well, yeah, because I do!” She didn’t understand what was wrong with having a degree. Maybe it was because he didn’t like that sort of thing? If Tara remembered right, he was into rockets and stuff.

 “And you graduated high school with my Kimmie-cub…” Again with the obvious tone.

 “Yes?” She waited for him to say something else.

 He tilted his head at her. “...how do you have a college degree if you just graduated high school?”

 A bright smile crossing her face as she answered with giggles, “I took extra credits through the college credit program!”

 “Enough to earn a degree when you graduated high school?” Dr Possible asked in disbelief.

 “Well, yeah! I started doing it my freshman year, and just kinda kept going.” She shrugged, continuing, “I wanted to get some stuff done, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t do it.” Another laugh bubbled up from her throat. “Even with college _and_ high school classes I maintained a 4.2 GPA!”

 “You can’t get a GPA that…” he trailed off as he looked at her papers again. “Huh. So you can.”

 “How do you think the cheerleading squad kept up their average GPA of 3.8?” The blonde asked with a mildly chastising tone. “Bonnie’s a good girl ‘n’ all, but she isn’t the studying kind.”

 “Uh-huh.” The doubt in his voice was confusing. What did she say that didn’t make sense? Before she could ask, the rocket scientist said with a grin, “Well, however it ended up I’m glad to welcome you to the facility! We’re all one big happy family here.”

 He turned, swiping his badge across the sensor for the door and pulling on the momentarily unlocked door. A sweep of his arm let her know to go first, with him following behind to pull the door shut. After the door was shut, Mr Possible motioned his hand and began walking, clearly indicating that she should follow.

 Tara blinked at the bright lights that had given her mild gray spots in her vision. With how bright it was she almost expected it to be a surgery room or something! Shaking her head, she began looking up and down the corridor they had just entered, even turning around and walking backwards to take it all in.

 Unlike the lobby, a modern but sterile-looking open space with some chairs and a stern receptionist, this hall had some semblance of personality. Silly-looking paintings were hanging on the wall, and every dozen feet there was a bulletin board with a variety of things on it, such as the weekly Rocket Booster meetings itinerary and various astronomy events that were coming up.

 Maybe she could start helping out with some of it! Oh, it would be spiffy if they had a Booster shirt in her size!

 Dr Possible’s voice cut into her thoughts. “I suppose I should start telling you about the position and what’s expected of you, but… Well…” He heaved a sigh. “To be honest, we’ve had three other hires before you that we thought would be perfect… The, ah, scientist that you’ll be under, though… He rejected them for being ‘unfit’.”

 “Unfit? Like, they needed to exercise more?”

 He laughed at that. “Oh no, nothing like that. It was more expectation-related.” Another set of doors, this time they had to wait for the ones behind them to shut before the ones ahead could open. “Drew gave them a test. They failed.” The next part was muttered, yet Tara heard it all the same. “Not that most people could pass...”

 “Is it ethics?” She hoped not. She managed to skip the ethics class by doubling up on some English courses. No chance she’d pass an ethics-based test!

 “HA! Haha, an ethics test, from Drew?” Kim’s dad shook his head. “I don’t think _he_ would pass one.”

 “That’s not a very nice thing to say,” Tara admonished. “He’s your friend, isn’t he Dr Poss-..”

 “Please, call me James,” he interrupted.

 “Erm, James, isn’t he your friend? Everyone here’s supposed to be family!”

 “Every family has its black sheep,” he noted, “and Drew… I suppose...” A light seemed to come on in his eyes. “Have you ever heard of Dr Drakken?”

 “Well duh!” Tara watched the news. From what she got, his plants were awesome while he was… Less so. Brooding insane mad scientist that was a laughingstock even among villains. It was almost sad, the backhanded compliments that were given to him. At least he got that nifty medal at the UN ceremony.

 “Good!” James nodded. “Dr Drakken was his villain name… But here, and in public now, he goes by Dr Drew Lipsky.”

 “Doctor?” Tara’s eyebrows furrowed. “The news said that he didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree! How can he be a doctor?”

 “Sometimes you don’t need to go to school to earn a doctorate,” the middle-aged man said vaguely, rushing his next words, “Anyway, Drew has been looking for an assistant and his requirements are strangely stringent. I’m not even sure his last assistant, Shego, could do it.”

 Before she could ask more about her, he continued, “She worked here with him for a short while, after they got their pardons. Mostly all she did was grumble at him and steal all of the cookies from the employee lounge. Some days she didn’t even bother showing up. The more time passed, the less she was here, until she just stopped showing up a few weeks ago. Vanished from the general public radar. Drew managed to track her down a few days after she left using our computer network…” Dr Possible cringed. “That poor lab table. Drew walloped it pretty good after their screaming match.

 “He’s been working by himself since then. Normally it wouldn’t be much of a problem… Drew’s a special case. He’s been getting more and more erratic as the weeks have passed. Certain… Individuals… The ones that set him up with a job here… Are concerned that he may relapse into villainy because of it. He can’t seem to function without a partner to at least talk with.” James sighed as they stopped in front of a set of heavy-duty doors. “But as hard as we’ve tried, he just won’t put up with anyone unless they wow him by passing his test. The previous candidates, we’ve assigned them to other tasks in the facility. There’s a place for you too, when he ‘fails’ you.”

 “Don’t worry!” The blonde gave him a confident smile. “I’m sure I can handle whatever he gives me.”

 “Just don’t feel like you’re stuck with trying to finish his silly test,” James said, turning the handle for the door. “When he tells you to go, wait outside the lab. One of us’ll be by in about an hour or so to take you to your new job.”

 Tara puffed her cheeks in frustration. He was already assuming she would fail? Her brain itched at the implied challenge, a protest on the tip of her tongue.

 Yet again, just as she was about to speak up, James opened the door to the lab. Was he psychic or something? How did he keep cutting her off like that?

 He entered the room with mild trepidation, looking around with concern as he hovered near the doorway. “Drew?”

 Tara, feeling a kind of petulant determination, went into the room in front of him.

 She gasped and gawked, her eyes soaking in everything around her.

 The workroom was _enormous_! High ceilings, the kind not really suited for a laboratory, loomed at least 30 feet overhead. The rest of the lab was similarly big, with the wall opposite the door mostly invisible, partly due to clutter.

 Scattered around the room and floor were a variety of half-finished projects. Robots slumped over, shells empty of hardware; glass tubes half-full of sludge-looking liquid; a small garden with a plentitude of flowering plants hung on a half-dozen tiers against one of the walls; a piece of some kind of metal art piece sat haphazardly a the corner; and in the middle of the room was a Lorwardian walker, a side busted open and laying on the floor.

 It was clearly the room of a career tinkerer. One with trouble concentrating on a single project. The room itself was pretty impressive. It left Tara with one nagging question.

 “Why does the space center even _have_ a room like this?” Her words echoed lightly, her normal volume breaking the audio emptiness of the room.

 “Well…” James scratched his head as he whispered, smiling as he did so, “This _used_ to be the launch area of the facility, for a certain type of rocket. It’s where the Kepler II was kept, and where it launched from. But… Well…” he looked away guiltily “We didn’t actually have clearance to have this room, what with the problem we had a few years ago when I accidentally launched a rocket that caused the military to scramble jets to chase it down…”

 “So you had to dismantle everything and were left with a big useless space,” Tara finished. “Yeah, I guess I can see why you’d give Dr Lipsky this room.”

 “Good thing we did, too,” he said quietly. “Goodness knows the rest of the center couldn’t handle this many projects at once!”

 “...why are you whispering?” the blonde asked, ducking in conspiratorially. “Are there security systems that react to noise? Does he have attack mutant weiner dogs? Oh!” She shot up, quiet forgotten as she said excitedly, “Or maybe he has monkey ninjas! Kim said stuff about seeing those on her missions!”

 “Oh no, nothing like that!” The middle-aged man began to carefully make his way deeper into the lab, Tara tagging along like a duckling following its mother. “It’s more Drew’s been jumpy lately. Why, just last week he almost vaporized Dr Wong for barging in and demanding to know why he needed so much electricity!” Another chuckle popped out of his mouth.

 That didn’t seem all that funny to Tara. Maybe it was an inside joke?

 Apparently bolstered by the joke, James said more loudly, “Drew?” as they began to strafe the Lorwardian walker.

 Once they partially rounded the large machine, Tara heard a mild tinkling sound, like metal hitting metal. She was pretty sure that it was coming from the direction of the walker. The doctor she was tagging behind apparently also heard it as he zeroed in on the quadropod.

 It was obvious where Dr Lipsky was now. Being closer, they could see a man hanging upside-down from the split-open walker, his legs tangled in some wires to keep him aloft.

 “...and connecting the thrust chamber with the energy source? What were they thinking? It’d be much more efficient…” Mumble mumble mumble, something Tara couldn’t make out.

 “Drew?” Dr Possible tapped the blue man’s shoulder once they were close enough.

 “ACK!” The surprise attack made Dr Lipsky lose his grip with his legs, sending him splatting to the floor.

 “I, uh, brought your new assistant…” Kim’s dad seemed a bit lost for words.

 “Hrmph.” The kinda-maybe doctor pulled himself up from the floor with as much dignity as he could muster. “ _I’ll_ be the judge on if she’ll be my assistant, thank you very much! Now then…”

 Tara stared, wide-eyed as he walked over to her. More like _lumbered_ with how big he was. Dr Lipsky? Maybe once upon a time… But no. This man...

  _Doctor Drakken_

 She could tell he used to be a villain. Heck, she’d think he’d _always and forever_ be a villain. Deathly blue and gnarled skin, vicious underbite and stooping forehead, and the ragged jaggedy scar made for a much scarier image than the tv or Kim ever made. Even his big blue lab coat and teeny hands were scary!

 “I, ah…” Tara felt trapped, the much-bigger-than-expected grumpy blue man towering over her like that. There was only one reaction, one solution she could come up with. Shaking now, she managed to squeak out, “OhlookIhavetogogoodbyeEEP!” before running for the door, dropping her notebook as she did.

 The two men stood as she fled, one with mouth agape and the other with a tilted head. After the door shut with a heavy THUNK, Drew began to laugh.

 “Ohhhh, I like her.” Dr Lipsky turned towards his former best friend and excitedly asked, “When does she start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Felix had a 4.4 GPA. Tara was super salty about not being the valedictorian.


	2. Chapter 2

“I _botched_ it.”

 Tara looked at Mr Scrumptilicious, her stuffed hot dog plushie friend, and sighed. “I can't believe I did that!”

 “It happens,” the large cushion-y food item soothed in the voice Tara reserved for him. “I’m sure that's happened _plenty_ of times to him. That Dr Drakken-Lipsky guy could probably scare the other half of a person to death!”

She gasped. “Mr Scrumptilicious! I can't believe you said that!”

“But you voice me! Doesn't that mean _you_ said that?”

“I… Ah…”

The blonde was saved from the conundrum by the ringing of her personal phone. No name popped up, but she knew who it was based on the number.

The Middleton Space Center. It’d only been about an hour since she’d fled the lab. Probably making sure to give her the “And STAY out! And we’ve blacklisted you everywhere ever!” line. Lines? Hm. Another conundrum.

The phone rang again for the second or third time (she wasn’t keeping track). She tentatively picked it up and answered, “Please don’t fire me!”

_Classy._

“What? Oh, no no no!” the voice of Dr Possible replied in quick succession. “No, you aren’t fired.”

“Huh.” _Another classy reply!_ The little Bonnie in her head tittered. Shut up, mean Bonnie!

“In fact,” James said with some excitement, “Drew said he wants you to be his assistant! Congratulations!”

“What? But… But I didn’t take the test!” Her eyes narrowed as she grumbled, “It’s ‘cause I’m pretty, isn’t it?”

The guffaw caught her by surprise. “DREW? Hire someone for looks? Ha! No, don’t worry about that.” Conspiratorially whispering, he continued, “Why, the second candidate was a woman that could give Shego a run for her money and he didn’t even look twice at her!”

Tara quietly asked, “Why are we whispering again?”

“Anyway!” James suddenly exclaimed, completely ignoring her question, “You’ll start as soon as possible. Goodness knows Drew needs _someone_ to talk to when he works.”

“And help with building really cool biotech!” she exclaimed.

“Erm, maybe.”

Maybe? That grumped Tara up again.

“What do you mean ‘maybe’?” she pouted.

“Well, some of Drew’s stuff is pretty advanced… I’m not sure that he’d let you touch some of it,” James said with a bit of a rush. A weird cadence, he has.

“I’m sure he’ll let me. I’m smart!”

“It’s not your intelligence that’s in question. It’s Drew’s… Drew. Just Drew.” He sighed. “Drew’s practically always in his lab, so you can come in whenever to start. I told him you’d be in tomorrow-..”

“Tomorrow?” That was weird; the day was barely started! “I can come in right now!”

“Right now?”

“You SAID I could come in whenever…” Tara reminded him. Silly guy, forgetting what he said already!

“Yes I did,” James replied amusedly. “Alrighty, I guess we’ll see you here later.”

“Gotcha!” Tara gushed. It was all she could manage to not burst out as the call ended. The second it was over, though, she squealed and jumped on her bed. “I’m not fired! And I got the job!” She grabbed Mr Scrumptilicious and squeezed him tight. “Thanks for believing in me!”

“No problem!”

\---------------------------------------------------------------

“La-la-lala, ohhhh yeah-ah-ah~” Tara hummed as she made her way down the not-unfamiliar hallway back to Dr Drakken-.. Nono, Dr _Lipsky_ ’s lab. She’d stopped for a few minutes to look at the notice board so she could find the meeting times for the Booster club as well as memorize the fire escape routes, but tried to keep in mind that she was getting paid by the hour. She didn’t want to be fired for dilly-dallying to add to her timecard!

Musing on what kind of card could tell the time (maybe a futuristic set of cards?), she eventually came to the large industrial doors that led to the doctor’s lab.

“It’s okay,” she reassured herself. “You can do this!” Feeling energized from her self-pep talk, she nodded and opened the doors wide.

“Don’t worry, Dr Lipsky, I’m here… To…” Her fire was lost and she suddenly felt sheepish at the sight that met her.

On the really really dented table that was near the doors sat the bad doctor. Or, more correctly, _laid_ the bad doctor. Half of him was sprawled on the lab table that was covered in papers, snoring soundly, while his butt was precariously balanced on a stool. The stool was also dented, which was why he was balanced precariously on it as opposed to regular balancing.

She was pretty sure that he wasn’t supposed to be sleeping. And how did he manage that in the couple of hours that she was gone? How long had he been tinkering with stuff before they’d come in earlier?

Shaking her head, Tara decided that he needed woken up. After all, sleeping in the middle of the day couldn’t be good for him.

“Dr D-.. Lipsky?” She tiptoed like in the tv shows over to where he was lay-sitting. Deciding that James had the right idea the first time as it did get his attention, the blonde got close enough to tap him on the shoulder. “Dr Li-..”

“ **GAH!** ” He fell off his seat, face scraping along the table audibly and dragging some of the papers to the floor.

Sitting flat on the floor, surrounded by papers (and even one stuck to his face!), he stared straight at the ceiling in a mild stupor. Because of this, Tara had to ask herself one question: how had she been scared of him before?

Okay, yeah, he’d _initially_ looked scary. Who wouldn't be scared of a megalomaniac supervillain towering over them? But… But Dr Possib-.. _James_ was right. Dr Lipsky. Dr Lipsky was this man. Dr Dra-..rew Lipsky. Wait. Could she call him Drew? The look on his face now that he was awake said “Nooooooooooo.”.

He jumped up straight from the floor - an impressive feat! - and shouted while flailing his head around, paper still stuck to it, “Who did-.. Oh.” He locked his gaze on her and his expression shifted from a strangely hopeful look to disappointment. “It's you.”

“It's me!” She beamed, hoping some of her bright shininess would rub off on his grumpy rainy day attitude.

“Hmph.” He was resistant, but she would prevail!

“What are you working on, Doctor Lipsky?” Tara asked. The question seemed to lower the grump to around 1500.

“What I am _trying_ to do,” Dr Dra-.. Lipsky said snippily, taking the piece of paper that was stuck to his face and slamming it back onto the table, “is create a strain of plant that can withstand an atmosphere with a concentration of molecules which numbers less than 1 million atoms per cubic centimeter, along with severe temperature fluctuations.”

“Like on the moon?” Tara asked, fascinated with the idea. “Something that can survive in such low pressure and high and low temperature… And no oxygen! Oh, but there’d be carbon dioxide…”

The dark-haired man blinked several times. “Erm, yes, you’re right! I’m trying to figure out how to create plants which can grow on the moon without need of any atmospheric conditioning.”

“But what’s with all this other stuff?” she asked, waving her arms around to indicate all of the stuff he had.

“Those are my _other_ projects.”

“To…?” She was trying to think of what the walkers could do for figuring out biological mutations.

“To, I don’t know, bring world peace?” He shrugged.

“...you don’t know, do you?” the blonde asked.

“No, I don’t,” Dr Lipsky said with some slumping.

“Okay.” It’s fine that he doesn’t know, because at some point everything has a purpose! “So what do we do first?”

The doctor froze with a goofy look on his face. After a few moments, he waved his hand around and said, “Just… Stand there and, I don’t know, sunbathe or something and grumble at my incompetence while I do my work.”

Tara tilted her head and honestly asked, “How can I sunbathe standing up indoors?”

“I don’t KNOW!” Dr Drew said, frustration clear. “I just, ngh…” He looked around, then down at his desk. A lightbulb moment happened - nearly literally as his face lit up - and spread his arm wide over the desk. “Organize and read these papers for me!”

Ah! Supportive research! _That_ made sense! “Can do!” She skipped over to the table across from the doctor.

“You can have my seat.You know, the _seat_ that I was _sitting on_ because I was _sleeping_ ,” he grouched at her, waving his hand theatrically over the tilty stool. Tara failed to stifle an excited giggle, which made his grump increase back to over 9000~ ...it was measured in micro-grumps, so it actually wasn't _that_ big of an increase. But still. His eyebrow was practically eating his eyeballs as he noted, “Just make sure the papers are good. Especially the highlighted areas. And listen to me talk and whatever.”

How can you measure good? Maybe he meant relevant? If he meant that, at least she had an idea. And oh! Was he going to share some of his secrets with her? That’d be cool! “Okay!”

He turned away, towards the plants on the wall, before he straightened up and said, “One more thing.” He walked back to the table and rummaged in the pile of papers to pull out her notebook! “No fanfics! You have time to write, you have time to read or something else that _isn't_ trite nothingness.”

\-------------------------------

Tara was dying of boredom. She thought so, anyway. Doing nothing productive was horrible!

It was clear he’d already read everything at least a few times. The paper was worn and wrinkled where he’d held it and all the really interesting stuff had been highlighted. There was no point in her reading it _for_ him when he’d already done it himself! Sure, she’d organized it, but with the staples holding the different topics together save for a few loose papers it took her 10 minutes tops. _And that was two hours ago!_

And his monologue! Just when she thought he couldn't have been more traumatized, he had another story to prove otherwise! No _wonder_ he became a supervillain.

She was doing what he wanted, but this couldn't be right. She was bored and he was doing cool stuff! That orchid looked WICKED, and the fact that it was independently mobile piqued her interest hardcore. It wasn't fair! She wasn't hired to do _nothing_ . In fact, she was hired to do _something_! Anything! Besides doing nothing while she was supposed to ignore him or whatever.

Defiantly, she stood up from the wobbly seat. “Dr Lipsky?”

“-..and he _knew_ at that moment that I was king of the playground! Never again was four square-..”

“Dr Lipsky!”

His head shot up from his concentration on measuring the thickness of the orchid’s leaf as he somehow grumbled happily, “What is it?”

“Is this all there is?” Tara asked.

“Hm?” He looked at her now and asked, “What do you mean?”

“I was hired to be _your assistant._ And I wanna assist! Not read stuff that you already read and not _do_ anything with it!”

“Oh.” He slumped again, defeated, as he grumbled, “Go get me coffee. Or something.”

Coffee! She could do coffee. And what assistant didn't get their boss coffee?

As she made for the lunchroom (which she knew from looking at the maps; finally paying attention to boards worked out for her!), she asked before slipping out the door, “What about donuts?”

“Ohhhh, donuts!” He straightened up in joy, his teeny hands clasping in delight. With an almost childlike giggle he said, “A chocolate one! With sprinkles!”

“Will do, Doctor!” Tara dutifully said as she began to shut the door.

“Hehehehe, _doctor_ ,” Drew crowed, loud enough that she could hear it even down the hallway.

It didn’t take long to get to the cafeteria. It was, conveniently, now located in the middle of the complex. And it had an actual kitchen! Tara was pretty sure it was because of that one company… GJ? They’d put a post in Middleton Space Center after everything that’d happened with the Lorwardians. The center had a looooot of people now, which necessitated a looooot of food and efficiency.

Once there, Tara was at a loss. It was huge! Not as big as Dr Lipsky’s lab, but big enough to really make an impact. There were enough tables to seat at least 200 people comfortably. The seats kind of reminded her of the Middleton High lunch room, but nicer and less high school. There was a nook in the back corner that held an _amazing_ kitchen area - Ron would've been salivating - and a large display area that featured all of the food available at the moment. It was a little past lunchtime so it was mostly empty, but Tara had a good feeling about the donut and coffee!

Doors to various parts of the complex - labs, front offices, GJ post, and a few that weren’t labeled on the map - lined the circular room. She wondered what was behind those other doors, but thought better of it. It _was_ only her first day! She wasn't a Snoopy McSnooperson.

The only people Tara saw were walking towards the door she'd entered through. In other words, right in front of her.

The first person was… WAS THAT VIVIAN PORTER? DR VIVIAN FRANCIS PORTER? Slim tanned blonde with an hourglass figure and a good taste in clothing in a science-y place? Definitely her! Wtfholycowwhatdoesshedonowhow-..

OH, she looked like she just got a styrofoam cup of something from the lunchroom area. She was blowing on it to cool it down. _Better keep it together; don't blow it, T!_ little Bonnie chided. This helped to calm Tara’s mind as she thought on the various life lessons Bonnie had given her on how to act around celebrity types. Thanks, Bonnie!

The other far more unremarkable person was a thin man in a super spiffy if dull blue dress-up suit with a moustache. He has a ring of hair around his head and was probably bald the rest of the way. It was a ‘probably’ because his hairpiece, as obvious as a Club Banana knock-off, covered his head very, very poorly. There might be a few tufts of hair hidden in it, after all. He was just about finished eating what looked like-.. A DONUT! Tara beamed and patted herself on the back for a job well done. She WAS on the right track!

At about the same time she’d noticed them, they’d noticed her. Both looked confused for a moment before a light of recognition flashed in Dr Porter’s eyes.

“And who’re you?” the balding man asked her kinda condescendingly. Shaking his head, he said with a professional air, “I’m sorry, but the back areas are for personnel only. You’ll have to go join the Booster Club meeting down the ha-..”

“She’s Drew’s new lab assistant, Dr Harris.” Dr Vivian Porter, as on top of things as Tara expected she’d be.

“He actually took an assistant?” The redhead boggled. A fierce look came to his face as he enthusiastically stated, “Now we can finally have someone debunk his louty ways!”

“Hey now, not everything he does is something shady. Don’t forget, I based some of my work off of his Bebe designs!” Vivian defended. She turned to Tara and asked, “I caught that you’re his new assistant, but I missed the name.”

omfgDrVivianPorterwastalkingtoher

Very, very calmly, the assistant replied, “Tara. Tara Blie.”

“Terribly?” The beautiful blonde’s eyebrow tilted.

“Nono that’s just wrong!” Tara corrected, starstruckedness forgotten, “bleye.”

“Interesting last name,” Dr Porter said as she sat down at a nearby table, apparently deciding to hang out a bit more with the new kid. The redhead bald guy stayed standing, drinking his coffee like he was in a hurry.

“It’s German!” Tara said proudly.

“For…?”

The bubbly blonde tilted her head. “I don’t know. I don’t speak German.”

The man with the bad toupee… Dr Harris? For some reason he did a spit take and nearly lost his hair. Recovering enough to not-so-subtly replace it on his head, he commented with a chuckle, “Well aren’t you the funny one!”

“Funny ha-ha, or funny weird?” That got him to let out another laugh.

“Hilarious! I see a bright future for you!” He tousled her hair like a parent fussing with a child. That was definitely not cool! Bad doctor! But before she could protest, he strolled back off in the direction of the labs with what was now a probably empty cup of coffee.

Just as he was about to open the door, it was practically rammed into him by someone who wasn’t looking where they were going.

“What the-..” When Dr Harris saw who it was, his face drooped like a wet pancake. “ _Oh_. It’s you.” With clenched teeth, he ground out, “Hello, Possible.”

“Hello,” James tried to say back sheepishly as he stood to the side, but Dr Harris was already stomping through the door. That was pretty rude. Like, worse than Bonnie during Homecoming!

“Yikes. What was that about?” Tara asked her fellow blonde as Dr Possible made his way over to their table.

“Dr Harris doesn’t really like James much since a dinner that went belly-up ‘cause of Kim getting hit with a truth ray.”

“He never got over the comments about his toupee…” the older guy trailed off as he joined them, clearly having heard the end of the conversation like a spy. Soooo kinda like Kim? Or oh! Maybe it was his psychic powers again!

“He should! That thing can be spotted from space!” the assistant said with some mirth, deciding against asking about his secret powers. “I don’t think we needed the space center to be up and at ‘em to help ward off the Lorwardians when that’s on patrol!”

“I’m just glad the space center was considered a priority,” Vivian noted, stirring her tea, “considering how trashed it was after the invasion. Kennedy and Vandenberg, too.”

“They ‘got wrecked’ worse than we did.” James was trying to sound cool, like Dr Drew when he had been getting worked up during his ranting. Tara wondered if they realized how alike they were sometimes. Before she could voice her thoughts aloud, the rocket scientist’s psychic powers kicked in and he plowed over her, “Those glory hounds, trying to get rebuilt first so they could take credit being on the bleeding edge of space travel!”

“Don’t be _too_ smug, James,” Vivian uttered cooly. “Don’t forget that we’re on the frontlines for villain activity now. I heard a rumor that Gemini himself wants to take us over so he can blast some GJ orbital satellites to bits.”

GJ? Gemini? Huh. Tara didn’t know the latter, but the former was just down the hall. Wonder how they got their hands on satellites? Maybe that's why they moved into the space center.

“How did you hear about GJ satellites or that Gemini fellow?” He happened to ask what Tara was thinking, another point in the pot of him being secretly psychic!

“I have my sources,” Vivian said all mysteriously vague-like. Changing topic, she turned to Tara and asked, “So, how is it, working for the big blue lug?”

“It’s…” She tried to find the right words. Her shoulders slumped as she found them. “...not happening.”

Dr Porter’s mouth twitched, almost smile-like. “Do go on.”

“Like… He wants me there, but he doesn’t know what to do with me?” Tara began to pout, “I don’t think he knows what to do with me.”

“As you already said,” the other blonde also also said. Leaning forward, Vivian queried with a cat-like grin, “How often has he mentioned Shego?”

“Shego? He hasn’t really said much besides about himself and his traumatic childhood. He just told me to sunbathe and-..” She gasped. “His coffee and donut! I forgot to get him his stuff!”

“Sorry kiddo, but Dr Harris got the last donut,” Vivian said with a shake of her head.

“Noooooo~” Tara drooped. “I can’t fail my mission! What will I tell the doctor?”

“To actually read the time chart for the lunchroom?” snarked the beautiful woman between sips of what the younger blonde could now tell was tea.

“I know!” The assistant posed boldly, fist clenched in magnificent awesomeness. “I’ll go out to a store and get him one!”

The two other scientists stared.

“Uh… Huh…” Dr Porter said, nodding slowly. Dry like toast, she commented, “I can see why Drew picked you as an assistant now.”

“It’s ‘cause I’m smart!” Tara beamed.

“Of course you’re smart,” James agreed. “But I wouldn’t suggest-.

“But how will I get him his donut? I can’t fail my first assignment!”

“I think she’ll have to either go out or ask for a fresh donut, but you’ll have to wait for a new one,” the svelte blonde said.

Tara boggled. “I can ASK for a donut, or whatever I want?”

This time it was James the belly-laughed. “Of course! Dr Freeman upgraded the kitchen to run itself. You just go over and ask for what you want if it isn’t already out and poof! There it’ll be.”

Poof? As in magic! OH! That was so cool! Science and magic together at last.

“That’s great!” Excited at the prospect of completing her first task, she completely forgot about the two other scientists as she ran for the food area.

As she mused over the order her boss had given her again, she thought about the chocolate donut. Chocolate with chocolate? Double chocolate? Nah, he would've said chocolate chocolate if he'd wanted chocolate chocolate. So it’s a regular chocolate with sprinkles. Tara had no idea how the sprinkles would stay on a plain chocolate donut, but who was she to judge the eating habits of a really smart guy?

...if you could ask for whatever you wanted, why even have a time chart for the lunch room?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry Tara, but it's Dutch, not Deutche.


	3. Chapter 3

Several minutes later, Tara was entering the humongous lab that Dr Lipsky called his own. She was the best assistant ever! Not only did she get a fresh donut from the gossipy fryer that was on a plate and everything to keep the sprinkles around, she’d also been present for a fresh brew of coffee! She was so lucky, and her boss would be so happy. Like, maybe she’d already get a promotion to senior lab assistant!

“Dr Lipsky~ I got your donut and coffee~” she sang-songed, skipping over to where the loud bangs were emanating from. Sure enough, the doctor was messing around with the empty robot, tinkering with some of its innards and trying to reconnect servos.

“Hm?” He looked up, confused. “Coffee and do-.. OH! Right. You.” Dr Lipsky sounded very unenthused. The coffee was clearly needed! His face turned grumbly as he wiggled his fingers towards her and said, “Well?”

“Right!” Tara handed over the coffee first. He chug chug chugged it in one breath. She knew she was right! The coffee was definitely a must. Another waggle of fingers saw her flourishing the donut.

“Hm? What’s this?” He made a face as he picked the kind-of-sprinkly donut up. “Nonono, this is all wrong!” He threw her Donut of Perseverance on the ground and stomped on it. “I wanted a chocolate donut! Covered in chocolate! Not a chocolate-chocolate donut!”

Tara looked down at the donut that she had worked so hard to get. She looked back up at him, her face twisting.

“What… What are you doing?” he said, eyebrows knitting together.

“I…” She choked a little, sadness filling her like a sad thing.”I tried really hard…”

Drew cringed away. “Just… Stop! Stop being all… Nnngh…”

Tears began to build. “I just…”

“Nnnngh… Fine! Watch!” He made a show of picking the donut off the floor and taking a bite. He made a face then spit it out. “Bah! It tastes like boot!” She gave a couple of weak laughs, but it didn't stop the tears from flowing. He threw the donut back on the floor and stomped on it more. “Stupid donut!”

Now she was crying full-on. “I tried really hard to be a good assistant!”

Dr Lipsky’s eyes darted around before settling back on her. Cringing, he said, “And you, er, are a good assistant!”

She sniffled. “Really?”

“Erm, ah, yes! Really!” He seemed more confident in his words, clearly meaning that he meant them. He brightened like he’d had a brainflash. “In fact, I have an important assignment for you!”

“Like what?” Tara shuddered a little as she got her crying under control, tears beginning to dry up.

“Like… Ah…” He narrowed his eyes, judging her suddenly. “You know how literary citations go?”

“AIP, ACS, or MLA?” she asked, wiping her face more. She hoped it wasn't MLA. That one was super hard to get right.

He tilted his head, confused. “Uhm, erm, ACS. I need the highlighted areas noted on a sheet of paper.”

More stuff! Cool! Her tears forgotten, she enthusiastically said through the remnant of sniffles, “Can do!”

\----------------------------------------------------

“..-and they laughed. Oh, they laughed! But they certainly didn’t laugh when my new Bebes kidnapped them.” Dr Lipsky paused clipping one of his plants as he was remembering his first encounter with Dr Possible and his former posse after college. “Okay, they did laugh. Not at the Bebes, though!”

“Are those Bebes the same ones that Dr Porter used as a template to help build Oliver and her other projects, Dr Lipsky?” Tara asked, looking up from the newest set of research papers that she was looking through for relevancy.

“Nnnnngh, stop calling me Dr Lipsky!” The blue man put the tools that he’d been using to work on his plant down and turned towards the bent table Tara was seated at. “I’ve had you as my assistant for how long?”

“Uh…” Tara stared, thinking hard about the last several days of whirlwind research that the doctor had set her on. “...ten days.”

“Ten whole days! Ten! And you haven’t come up with a nickname at all?” Dr Drew tensed his hands in front of him all dramatic-like. “I’d be just as well off programming a robot to do what you do!”

“A robot can look at research papers and find stuff related to what you’re looking for?” she asked, excited. Wow! A robot with that kind of ‘thinking’ power would be really cool to see!

“Uhm…” He made the noise that she was starting to understand was him hitting a mental roadblock. Slumping, the doctor said, “No, no it can’t. But one will! Eventually! One that won’t become a homicidal maniac the second I turn it on!”

Cackling, he raised his hands up and Tara swore she heard thunder. Or the vents turning on. Either way, the ambiance was 8/10 for going along with his laugh.

Dr Lipksy lowered his hands and waved one around. “Now, coming up with a processor like that… I once created a son for myself, but that was a lucky break. I…” He looked a little sad, then his head shot up. “Wait. What were we talking about?”

Son... That was clicking a memory, but Tara couldn't quite think of it. “Nicknames?”

“Right! Nicknames!” Drew waggled a finger at her. “You need to come up with one, missy, if we’re going to keep working together!”

“Oh! Is mine Missy?” Tara asked. The only nickname she’d had was T, from Bonnie, so another one could be pretty fun! It’d be like a secret buddy sort of thing.

“Yeah, sure, you’ll be Missy. Because I definitely remember your name,” he said, clearly having forgotten her name. But that was okay! It’d only been ten days, and she already had a nickname at least!

This left her with a minor problem, though. She tilted her head and queried, “What should I call you? Doctor Drew?”

“I don’t know!” he said, exasperated. “Just… Doctor Lipsky… I like the ‘doctor’ part, but, erm, Lipsky…”

“Then what about Doctor Drakken?”

“BAH!” He made a spitting motion and declared, “Doctor Drakken is gone! I’m not him anymore. Doctor Drakken was a loser. I’M a WINNER!”

Tara didn’t understand what difference a name made. Wasn’t he him? What did it matter what he called himself? But it must’ve made some sense, or else he wouldn’t be trying so hard to not be Doctor Drakken.

“Okay! I’ll think of something really good,” the blonde said excitedly. It just meant that she’d have a challenge in front of her!

“Well, whatever it is, I think-..”

They were interrupted by Tara’s phone buzzing. They both knew what that meant!

“Coffee break~” she sang-songed, jumping up from her seat.

The doctor clasped his hands excitedly. “Oh! Make sure to get me-..”

“A chocolate-covered donut with sprinkles,” they both said at the same time. Tara continued, “For sure!”

He, like always, giggled as she left the room. She was super glad they’d established the coffee break a few days ago. It really helped to break the day up and keep them energized.

She’d barely started to walk down the hallway when a familiar female voice called out, “Heya Tara!”

“Vivian!” One big happy family, she reminded herself. No fangirling. She’d slipped up yesterday and went starry-eyed at Dr Porter. Her reaction to it was definitely not positive. So! They’re sisters now! Definitely not a fangirl and her idol. Nope. Not at all. She waved at the other woman, who was walking from the direction of the cafeteria, and said, “It’s coffee break time.”

“Same here,” the tanned blonde observed. “We’re both pretty needy for coffee.”

“‘We’?” Tara finally noticed that just behind Vivian was a short-haired brunette. Moderate build, kinda like Kim but with a larger bust, with a GJ uniform and an eyepatch over her right eye. Ouchy! Wonder what happened to make her need an eyepatch?

“Vivian’s told me a bit about you,” the woman said. Holding her hand out, she introduced herself. “Hello. I’m Doctor Director. I’m the head of Global Justice.”

“Global Justice?”

The two other women exchanged glances. Dr Porter noted, “Global Justice is nicknamed GJ, as in the initials.”

“Ohhhhh, that makes sense!” Tara was surprised that she’d missed that. It was pretty obvious!

The brunette chuckled. “Just like Vivian described…”

“What does that mean?” the younger blonde said with puffed cheeks. That almost never meant anything good.

“That you are a very bright young woman who will contribute a lot to her field once she gets some experience,” Dr Director smoothed over.

Tara beamed. “Aww, thanks Vivian!”

“No problem, kiddo,” Vivian said, smiling and looking at Dr Director. It was a weird look, like what Tara’s mom and dad did whenever they did something particularly sneaky. But what was so sneaky about this?

“How is Drew doing?” The question from the brunette was so straightforward and serious-sounding that it caught Tara off-guard.

“I, ah, the doctor wants a donut,” she replied dumbly. “He always wants a donut with his coffee.”

Vivian stifled a chuckle while Dr Director shook her head. “I meant how he’s doing overall. He was pretty shaky there with Shego being gone.”

Shego? Hm. She was his former assistant, wasn’t she? The mean green woman that Kim sometimes talked about? Oh well, it didn’t matter. “He doesn’t seem to really be bothered by it.”

Both womens’ eyebrows rose. Looking between themselves, Vivian asked with disbelief, “Really?”

“Really! Like, I haven’t heard anything about her.”

“That’s…”

“Good?” Tara supplied.

“Worrying.” Vivian’s concern was echoed on Dr Director’s face.

“Why would you be worried that he hasn’t talked about her much? Isn’t that good, that a bad influence is out of his life?” The younger blonde was well and truly confused. She knew enough about Shego from Kim to know that she was mean. Like, really mean. Why would they want Doctor Drew to think about her?

“Shego is bad, that much is true,” Dr Director agreed, “but she was also a balancing factor in his life. They were partners for over 5 years. When you’re with someone that long, they leave a mark in your life.” She sighed. “We’d been hoping that him going back to his civilian identity would convince her to do the same…

“Doctor Lipsky is at a delicate point in his life. He’s trying to transition from being the villainous Doctor Drakken to being the intelligent but far more normal Doctor Drew Lipsky. He’s currently stuck between his two identities, so to say.”

“Oh, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?” Tara loved that story!

“Not quite. It’s more of a good vs bad sort of thing, not any sort of real monster or evil involved…” Dr Director shook her head. “If only Shego had come with for the transition… We’d predicted that it would have been a smooth experience, for both of them. With her having left, however, so has a pillar of his life. Him not even mentioning her to you after even one day, let alone ten, means that he’s not dealing with it. And Doctor Lipsky has already refused psychiatric help.”

“He’s seemed pretty normal to me, if eccentric,” Tara shrugged. “Why would he need a quack?”

“Tara! I’d expect better from you!” Vivian scolded. “‘Quack’? That’s demeaning to the profession!”

“But…!” The assistant pouted. “But Bonnie said-..”

“I think Bonnie is as bad of an influence on you as Shego was on Drew! Especially from the other things I’ve heard about her.”

The younger blonde gasped. “How could you say something like that about Bonnie?!”

“Your friend isn’t as nice as you seem to think,” Dr Director said. When Tara tilted her head, the older woman supplied, “We’ve been keeping tabs on Miss Bonnie Rockwaller, now Bonnie Senior-..”

A harder, even worse gasp left Tara. “Bonnie got married and didn’t invite me?!”

“That’s the kind of friend your ‘friend’ is,” Vivian scoffed, waving a hand in dismissal.

“Yes she did,” Dr Director said. She gave Tara a critical eye. “I’m guessing you two were great friends.”

Tara felt a little part of her heart tear. “I… I thought we were…”

“Then maybe you feel a little like how Drew felt with Shego! Do you think you could just get over it easy, even with Bonnie being ‘bad’?” Vivian asked with more hostility than Tara had ever expected to get from her idol. Was her comment about psychiatry really that bad?

“I’m… I’m sorry about calling psychiatrists quacks…” Tara said as she choked down tears, trying to ignore the piece inside of her that was bleeding. “Just, Bonnie always told me that they make their money on people too weak to handle their own stuff.”

“That sort of misconception is what drives people that really need help away!” Dr Porter grumbled. “My cousin, Electra, SHE needed help and didn’t go for any until after she was reverse polarized!”

“Reverse whatnow?”

“Irrelevant to the conversation, and getting off track,” Dr Director admonished. Vivian snorted and turned away. “The point is that Doctor Lipsky needs help and isn’t getting any, or letting himself work through losing his partner.”

“So… He’s stewing like poison on it?” Tara asked, trying to process the idea that was being presented to her.

“Something like that,” the brunette agreed.

“Okay… I think that makes sense.”

“Please, keep an eye out for it he starts to display… Worrying behavior. Let myself or another operative know if you have any concerns regarding Doctor Lipsky,” Dr Director requested before turning and leading her companion down the hall from the lunchroom.

“Like I was saying, Betty, I think that…” Vivian’s still-heated voice trailed off down the hall, barely audible but still clear enough to hear.

Tara would need to apologize more to Vivian later. It felt like she’d had a family row with her, arguing something small and dumb. As for Doctor Drew… Stuck between his two identities… Huh. Like Bonnie and her Queen B persona which, it sounds like, won out... Tara was the only one that really got to see her with her armor off and just be B...

...OH! That gave her a great idea for a nickname!  
\-----------------------------------------

“Here’s your coffee!” 

“No donut?” her boss grumbled.

“Terrence is out with a virus,” Tara noted, still trying to ignore the sting the news about Bonnie had given her. The day before, someone had tried to get one of the kitchen staff to work when they were sick, the entire lunchroom ended up covered in pizza dough!

“Oh.” He slumped, arms crossing. “Hmph! Stupid machines getting sick…”

“OH!” She knew he’d be excited about this. “I came up with a nickname while I was in the lunchroom!”

“Really?” The curiosity in his voice bolstered her.

“Yeah!” Tara cleared her throat and declared, “Your new nickname is ‘Doctor D’.”

He looked stunned. “Doctor… D…?”

“Yup!” Now whispering, she shared, “It’s ‘cause you wanna be Doctor Drew Lipsky but you’re used to being Doctor Drakken. Doctor D, because of Drew AND Drakken!” She waited on feedback, beaming at her cleverness. After a few moments of silence, the assistant looked at her boss and found a surprise.

His eyes were slightly misted over, like he was holding back tears. Why would he be tearing up? Was her nickname really that bad? She couldn’t make him cry! It wasn’t nice!

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings at al-..”

“It’s fine,” he said, voice cracking. “I, erm…” Wiping his face on his sleeves, he sniffled and turned away. “Doctor D is fine. Just… Nostalgic.”

“Okay…” She wasn’t sure if he was being honest or not. He seemed almost heartbroken! But before she could quiz him on it, he began marching back over to the walker.

“Follow me.” Doctor D said it roughly, his throat still tight.

Huh? “But what about these papers? I thought yo-..”

“I said follow me.” Ohhh, scary voice. She hit a nerve somehow. With a name? Obediently she followed him, not daring to say anything else.

She hadn't seen the walker since her interview. Now it was far emptier than it had been before. One of the legs was completely dismantled, the pieces laying around under the joint in its separate parts. The innards of the main body were opened up now and a variety of wires were hanging out. He took a bundle of them in his teeny hands and began to examine them. She stood awkwardly, waiting for him to give her any instructions. 

Minutes passed. Tara fought the urge to shift from one foot to the other, a little afraid of making him more upset. What did she do wrong? How did she upset him like that? Was that was his mother called him? Or was it a mocking nickname? Just as she was about to give in and start swaying on the spot, he broke the silence.

“It made me think of something… Someone that used to call me that. My old-..” He choked again, gulping down more sadness than Tara thought was healthy. “Anyway, you can go ahead and call me that if you want. I need to get over that kind of, of sentimental rubbish.”

Now that Dr Director had brought it up, his comment sounded a lot more sinister and bad than it would have before.

“Okay, Doctor D,” Tara said cautiously. He flinched, but nodded sternly at the nickname. He seemed to accept it even with how painful it was. But why did it feel like such a bad idea?

\------------------------------------

Tara sat in her room at her parent’s house. She was staring at her phone. Displayed on the screen was the contact info for Bonnie Rockwaller.

Not Bonnie Rockwaller anymore. Bonnie Senior, if that agent lady was to be believed. Again, that little piece of her heart that loved her best friend friend-like felt like there was some bleeding. Why didn’t Bonnie tell her any of this? Or invite her at all? Maybe it was a quickie wedding. After all, Tara hadn’t heard anything about a fancy wedding, and Bonnie would definitely have one! All snazzy and fun, maybe with a famous singer as the entertainment.

...that didn’t mean much. Tara wasn’t really keeping a pulse on social events anymore, B and high school food chains being her only real reason to keep in touch with that side of her life.

This could be really, really bad. Like, Bonnie dresses-her-down-before-discarding-her bad.

...it wasn't healthy to let the poison stew. Better to bite the bullet.

She hit ‘call’. The grip she had on her phone tightened as the phone rang. And rang. And rang. Eventually it clicked and a familiar voice stated, “This is the cell phone of Bonita Senior.” She sounded so pleased. And Bonita? Why didn't Bonnie tell her that her name was a nickname?

“Like, leave a message and if you aren't a loser I might call you back,” the crisp snappy voice of her maybe former best friend clipped out. A moment later the line beeped. Tara took a deep breath.

“B? It's T…”


	4. Chapter 4

The next day saw Tara standing next to the walker again. This time there was silence. Just like yesterday. The day before, Doctor D had had her standing and watching him take the machine apart while he made jagged little notes on a clipboard. She had no idea how he could read them; they were true chicken scratch written by a doctor. It was proof that he was a true-blue doctor.

Hehe, blue.

This time, however, saw him in a bit of a pickle. He was holding several wires with his hands, one wire between each finger, while also trying to jot something down with his vines. It was even sloppier than before and it was obvious that the doctor could no longer read his notes. He was starting to sweat now as the effort with his vines was starting to wear on him. The one major weakness to his new powers.

Watching him, it made her wonder… How many times had he ended up in a situation like this? He’d always pretty much worked alone… So it must’ve been a lot.

...but he wasn’t alone anymore.

Before she knew it, she was already over next to her boss. “Here, let me have that,” she said carefully as she reached for the clipboard. Her boss’s face screamed for her to back off, but his vines easily handed over the paperwork and pencil. Determined, she braved his grump and said, “Okay Doctor D, what didja wanna write down?”

He flinched, a small one, before he gestured to his hands with his head. “What do you  _ think _ I want written down?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

“Nnnnngh…” He wiggled his pinky finger which was holding a small pale green wire. “This. This wire is the connector between the thrust capacitor and the switch leg.”

“Ohhhh, a switch leg? I didn’t think that aliens would care about switches like that in their battle droids!” Tara gaped at the wire.

“They had an off switch in their battleship. Clearly they have a safety-related mindset,” Dr Drew admonished with a touch of sarcasm. “This one-..” he wiggled his ring finger which was holding a thick braided metallic wire, “..-seems to somehow compensate for any overcurrents that might occur in any of the circuits which lead to the legs…”

It went on like that for the next several minutes. For each wire, Tara noted the appearance and the purpose or, at least, the purpose that Doctor Lipsky could tell or guess at. With every wire she recorded, he let it go back to the bundle that he’d pulled them from. By the end of it, every wire was back into place and he was beginning to dig around in other places.

“And that,” he nodded above him where a small latched box was welded to part of the frame, “is a two gang.”

“Why’re you documenting all of these wires, Doctor D?” Tara asked as she recorded his latest note.

This time he didn’t flinch. “I’m trying to create an electrical installation condition report for these monstrosities. I feel like the better we understand their structure, the more likely we’ll be able to adapt their technologies into our own.”

“Huh.” The assistant didn’t think that their technology would be even close enough to Earth’s to be able to adapt that easily, but she wasn’t about to press him on it. Not when she was probably on thin ice for stepping in like she did.

Almost like he’d read her mind, he noted, “I’m surprised at how closely our technology matches up with theirs! Just about the only difference seems to be how they implement theirs, and the materials they use.” The blue man knocked a gloved fist against the chassis. “This material isn’t one I’ve ever seen before! It seems to be some kind of carbonite/adamantium composition… I’m not even sure how I can take it apart to examine it save for brute forcing it with my vines…”

“Not even a diamond-tipped saw? Or a high-density laser drill?” Tara looked, wide-eyed at the walker.

“Not even a diamond-tipped saw or a whatchamacallit!” The doctor shook his head and pointed over at a pile of what Tara had originally thought was debris of some kind. Now she could make out the different shapes that corresponded with saws, power and hand, and a variety of other power tools. “Trust me, I tried.”

“Did you try-..”

“Whatever you’re going to suggest, I tried. Did you not  _ see _ the pile of tools I left?! That I  _ literally _ just pointed at?” he grumbled incredulously.

“Sorry…” She pouted, not expecting to feel as dumb as she felt. How could she not think that he’d tried everything he could? It wasn’t like he wasn’t a doctor for no reason! 

“Anyway…” He gave her the critical eye that he gave whenever he was about to be particularly harsh. “What were you thinking, taking  _ my _ clipboard away from me? Did you think I couldn’t handle it on my own?”

She wasn’t cringing. She wasn’t! She was just… Readjusting her position as she answered, “No! Of course not! I was just…” Honesty was the best policy, right? “...I was just thinking that, as your assistant, I should be helping you do small stuff like that. It’s…” Oh! “It’s not something you should have to do, Mr Boss Person Doctor Guy.”

“Hm?” His eyebrow tilted in interest. That was the right thing to say!

“Yeah! Totally! Like, I’m your  _ assistant _ ; I’m supposed to do that sorta stuff! And you literally had your hands full.” She asked, curious, “How much would you have gotten done if I hadn’t been there to write stuff down?”

THAT caught him off guard. “I, uhm, erm, nnngh…” He slumped in defeat. “It would’ve taken me da-.. Erm, a bit longer.” He shot straight up as he defended, “But not by much!”

“By enough to notice.” Tara was on the attack now! Better watch out, Doctor D! “I’m here, as your assistant, to help you! It’s what you hired me to do! So please, let me help!”

“I’m, I’m just not  _ used _ to getting help, that’s all,” Doctor Lipsky said, crossing his arms. He was clearly uncomfortable saying that, and it made the blonde think about his former assistant. What did she do for her job? She had been his assistant, hadn’t she? How was he not used to help?

Oh well. It didn’t matter now. What mattered was that  _ she _ was there! “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it and I bet you’ll like it! I was helpful today, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, yes you were.” This time he actually smiled. A REAL smile, with teeth and everything! It was bright and shiny and made her think of a cheerful child. He got nervous all of a sudden and said, “Th-.. Thank you, Missy. For your help.”

“No problem, Doctor D!” She beamed right back.

There was the flinch again. Should she ask about it?

_ He’s not  _ dealing _ with it _ .

...she should ask him about it.

“Doctor Lipsky…”

He sighed, exasperated. “What did I say about using  _ names _ -..”

“You said you aren’t used to getting help… What about your former assistant?”

He froze. “My what?”

“Your former assistant! Shego!” Tara balanced back and forth on her feet like an excited puppy. “What did she help you with if it wasn’t machine stuff?”

“Drop it.” The tone was flat, warning. A little scary. But sometimes you just had to push. Cruel to be kind, like that one fanfic she read said about the pegasus daughter!

“I bet she helped you do secret spy stuff. Or oh! What about security?”

“Missy, drop it  _ now _ .” His voice was heating up, edging on angry below the attempt to stay calm.

“But what kind of villain would need security? I mean, if she was she wasn’t very good at it…”

Now he was grinding his teeth and hitting his head against the open panel of the walker. She was a little concerned that she was seeing enamel falling out from the pressure. It would be fine, though! It’d be like a pressure valve! He’d feel a lot better once he started to talk, even a little bit.

“Kim always talked about fighting Shego, so maybe she was your bodyguar-..”

“ **I SAID DROP IT!** ”  **_BAM!_ **

Tara ducked at the shout and the loud smashing clang of metal bending. She looked up from where she was crouching and stared. They both gaped at the dent in the belly of the walker, flabbergasted. He’d dented it.  _ He’d dented the walker  _ **_with his head_ ** .

“I… I…” His hands twiddled in extreme distress, his brow knitted in horror. Whether it was at what he did, or the fact that he wasn’t hurt in the slightest she wasn’t sure. “I don’t know why I…”

“I think it’s time for a coffee break,” Tara said quietly. Her alarm hadn’t gone off yet.

“Y-yes, a coffee break sounds marvelous!” Doctor D let out a high pitched nervous giggle. “Go ahead and get whatever you want.” His eyes traveled around the room, everywhere, except for looking at her. “I, uhm, I think I’ll, ah, go and get some fresh air! Yes! That’s right! I’ll go get some fresh air.”

They both nodded at each other and went in opposite directions, him towards the fire escape door and her towards the cafeteria.

There was one thing that she had forgotten… Tara had forgotten that pressure valves have to climb to very high pressures when they finally burst.

\------------------------------------

A few hours later and everything was kind of back to normal. Well, as normal as things went with her boss. Now he was back at it with the plants, something that she was certain was very, very intentional as it was the farthest project away from the walker.

“-..he rued the day that he tried to give me a wedgie! Yes, he succeeded, but Sheldon never again tried to mess with Betty or I when we had lasagna as the special of the day! We would..-”

“Please tell me you didn’t ruin lasagna to get back at someone!” Tara said, horrified. How could someone do something awful with something so pure and innocent as lasagna?

Doctor D looked a little sheepish. “Erm, yes, I did.” She gasped and he steamrolled over her shock, “It was nasty stinky middle-school lasagna anyway! No one cared.”

“Did you ask everyone?”

“Of course not!” he said with a bark of laughter.

“Then you don’t know that!”

Silence sank into the room after her comment which somehow seemed to make the doctor happy. It sucked, what she was about to do next. She had to ask again. She  _ had _ to. He was clearly hurting and needed help, past that mask of giddy happiness. “Doctor D?”

“You’re going to ask again, aren’t you?” Drat! She’d been found out already! But this time, he didn’t sound angry. More… Resigned?

What could she say to that? “Yes.”

He sighed a heavy sigh, like something was weighing on him. All she could see was his normal coat and stuff though.

“Shego was… My assistant. Bodyguard. Fri-..” His voice hitched. “Well, bodyguard. She stole stuff for me, I paid her.” He just kinda shrugged. “That’s it.”

“That’s it?” All that build-up, for that? There was clearly something else going on! “I think you’re lying!”

“Well, aren’t we a Snoopy McSnooperson?” he snipped. “I bet you’ll want to know where my timeshare lair is next!”

“Your what now?” That was something significant, she was pretty sure, but she didn’t know why.

“Nevermind!” He snorted. “What matters is that I told you about Shego! Case closed!”

“Case reopened due to lack of evidence,” Tara stated, drawing from what Bonnie’s sister once said in an argument that she eventually won with her other, not-super-smart-but-super-pretty sister.

“Nnnnngh… Fine! Whatever! What did you want to know?” He shouted, angrily cutting off too big of a piece of his current test subject. It replied with a resounding THWACK! on his head. “Ouch!”

Tara took a few moments to think. “What was she to you?”

The color drained from his face, making him look more like a corpse than ever. “She was my bodyguard,” he insisted, his voice taking on an edge. “Nothing more.”

“Hmmm…” Well, at least he finally said  _ something  _ about her. Tara was pretty sure she'd hit a brick wall as far as trying to pry about Shego. She shrugged, “When you  _ really _ wanna talk about her, I’ll be here.”

“Unless I fire you for insubordination,” he grumbled quietly, but not quietly enough as he turned his back to her to work.

_ Oh _ . She’d forgotten he could do that. So caught up in wanting to help him that this was, at the base of it, a  _ job _ . One which he could fire her from at any time. Crackers and celery sticks!

What followed was a few uncomfortable minutes of silence. Doctor D didn't seem to notice, or want to notice. She couldn't figure out which it was. Maybe he was just really casual at giving threats like tha-..

Her phone buzzed.

“Breaktime!” The doctor shot up - a feat since he’d been standing - and swung around to face her. “Oh, can I get-..”

“A chocolate covered donut with sprinkles?”

“-..a biiiig slice of lasagna?”

Tara blinked a few times. “Lasagna?”

Doctor Lipsky shrugged, “Our discussion earlier made me really want some.”

“Oooookay…?” She got up to leave, confused. This was the first time since they established the coffee breaks that he wanted something different. Did the cafeteria even serve lasagna? “I’ll get some if they have some!”

“‘If’? If they have some? Of COURSE they have some!”

“I dunno… That one time when I tried to get a crumpet, they didn’t ha-..”

“THAT was a  _ crumpet _ ,” he sniped. “THIS is lasagna.”

“That doesn’t really mean much…” Tara said. “Lasagna is a whole lot more complicated than a donut. We can’t have them special make it.”

“That shows what you know!” Wow, his grump really jumped up. She couldn’t blame him, though, considering how the day had been going for him. He suddenly got a determined look on his face as he said, “I’ll  _ make sure _ they give me some lasagna!”

“How?”

“I…” He posed dramatically. “...will come with you!”

“To the cafeteria?” she asked with a tilted head.

“To the cafeteria!” he said, beginning to march for the door.

Tara took a moment to think. Her boss, who she’d never seen even leave the room, was now leading the way to the cafeteria.

“...okay!” she chirped, following in his wake. She exited the door just behind him and shouted down the hallway the doctor had started down, “The cafeteria is the  _ other _ way!”

Today was full of surprises!


	5. Chapter 5

“-..yet I was the one who succeeded! Oh no, never again can Dementor claim that I am a failure! Now HE is the total loser!” Doctor D laughed maniacally, throwing the door to the cafeteria open.

“That isn’t very nice…” Tara pouted. “No one should be called a los-..”

She paused mid-word as she looked across the lunchroom at the group that was now staring at the two of them. Vivian, Dr Harris, a portly older man, and James had apparently been mid-discussion when they had shown up. The doctor’s echoing laughter probably got their attention.

Motion out of the corner of Tara’s vision caught her eye. The doors to the GJ branch were swinging shut, giving a split-second sighting of Dr Director swiftly exiting the room. Weird. Hm. Maybe seeing Doctor D made her think of justice-y stuff she had to do?

The other three were eyeing her and Doctor Lipsky with some interest. Belatedly, Tara realized that, duh! She hadn’t seen him exit his lab, so when was the last time anyone else had seen him outside it as well?

Vivian beckoned them over with a wave of her hand. The blue doctor somehow managed to notice, even with his lasagna mission. He even looked a little excited! His expression fell, however, as they came up to the group.

“-..and churning, until the goat butter was finally ready!” the older, larger man said excitedly, having started the discussion again a few seconds before.

“That’s, uh,  _ very _ interesting, Dr Kramer,” James said, his face conveying that it was very much not interesting.

“Riveting,” Dr Harris confirmed with just as much sincerity.

“Oh yes! But wait until you hear about how the goat butter was  _ used _ ,” the mystery man said in an olde timey accent of an olde country, olde.

“Oh, don’t bother me with your drivel, Doctor Cram-it,” Doctor D said as he paraded by the group of doctors, more like a peacock than a grumpy scientist of questionable morality.

“You up to anything interesting in that stuffy lab of yours, Doctor Lipsky?” Vivian asked, ignoring the now irritated lecture-y older man’s sputtering.

“N-- Ye-- ...maybe!” he shouted petulantly behind him.

“Hm.” Vivian looked at his back with some interest before getting up and following him towards the food counter. Tara tarried by the larger group, curious. After all, when would the next time she’d hear about goat butter be?

“The nerve of him…!” The old scientist was clearly very upset at Doctor Lipsky forgetting his name. He shouldn’t be! He has a nickname, even if it’s a bad one!

“Now now, Dr Kramer. You know  _ him _ …” Doctor Harris soothed, standing up from his spot at the table.

“Hmph,” Doctor Kramer grumbled. “I know him very well, yes.”

“So do I!” Tara said, joining into the conversation cheerily.

“Indeed you do, Miss… Ah…” The balding man snapped his fingers as he mentally reeeaaached for Tara’s name.

“Blie,” she supplied, “But you can call me Tara! ‘Cause we’re all one big happy family!”

“Hmph. James took your ear up I take it?” That didn’t sound like a very happy tone in his voice. The weird side-eye thing he did at a shrinking James really made Tara think that wasn’t a good thing he was referring to either.

“Well, yeah! He took me on the tour and stuff. Told me about how we’re all a big family and that Drew’s the black sheep.” Why was James cringing harder?

“Speaking of, how are things going so far, working with  _ Doctor _ Lipsky?” Dr Harris asked, breaking the two of them away from the group of four. So now there were three groups of two! Maybe they could have a competition in teams! Oh! Maybe a science-off?

“Things’re going great!” Tara beamed. “We finished mapping out the electrical map of the walker’s legs, and we talked a little about Shego.”

“So, nothing  _ unusual _ ? Everything on the straight-and-up?”

“Yes?” Why did he sound disappointed?

“Nothing involving killer robots or sentient plants or, or, mad science of any kind?” he pressed.

Since they were on the topic… “There is one thing that struck me as weird…”

“Yes?” Dr Harris looked hopeful. Maybe he was hoping to hear about a breakthrough?

“I’m not sure how he stays so clean!”

The balding doctor gobsmackedly replied, “ _ Keeping clean _ is the one thing that struck you as weird?”

“I never see him leave the lab!”

“Until today,” noted the balding doctor with a mild tone of interest.

“Until today,” Tara agreed cheerfully, sparing a glance at her boss. He seemed rather animated, arms waving in excitement over something that Vivian had said. In turn, Vivian looked amused at his antics, smirking at him like he was a particularly entertaining child.

“I wonder, what drove him to leave his lab today?” Dr Harris said leadingly, eyeing Tara like she knew everything in the universe.

“I dunno. Lasagna?” She was smart, but not that smart!

“You could have easily gotten him lasagna,” he said pointedly, his tone less friendly than before.

“I know! It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It. Is.” The balding man made a quick strangling motion before slumping his shoulder and sighing, “So he just randomly decided to leave his lab.”

“Not randomly! Lasagna!”

Why was he pretending to his his head on a wall?

“Either which way,” he ground out, “he left his lab. Which means his lab is empty right now.”

“Yes…?” Tara gasped. “Oh no! We forgot to lock the door!” As far as she was aware, there was no electronic lock for Doctor Lipsky’s lab. Just heavy doors, which would only be able to stop a really weak person! Very bad security in such a secure building.

“Don’t worry too much about it, my dear,” the doctor said in a weird voice, kinda like when Bonnie is being particularly look down-y at someone. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Promise?” She didn’t want to get in trouble for leaving the lab unattended. The blonde had only been there for less than two weeks, after all! A slip-up like that could cause all  _ sorts _ of problems! Like, steal-the-research problems!

“I promise.” This time there was a hint of wicked! She saw that! What he had to be mean about she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t like it. “We’ll both make sure that  _ Doctor _ Lipsky doesn’t know about your little goof.”

“Hm…” Tara pondered. Should she trust one of the heads of the board of directors with a small silly mistake that she, a noob, had made in the course of her duty? “...okay. But don’t make me pinky promise that!” She nodded seriously, “Pinky promises only in super serious situations.”

“Sure kid,” he commented, exasperated, probably at having to make a serious - but not super-serious - promise. He then asked, “If you’d be a dear, could you keep me in the loop on when he leaves his lab, and what he does in there? I’ll even clear my schedule for our little get-togethers. And give you my  _ personal _ phone number.”

Wow! A big boss man, wanting to talk to her soooooo much that he’d clear his schedule  _ and _ give her his phone number? That was crazy cool! “Okay!”

“Missy!”

Her head popped up as her eyes searched out her boss. Apparently their serious talk had been too long, as Doctor D was now at the door to go back to his lab, a plate in hand. The door was already swinging, the platinum blonde looking to have already made her exit. No fair! She never got to apologize for her comment about psychiatrists and stuff yet! Boo!

“Missy?” Doctor Harris quirked an eyebrow at her.

“It’s my nickname!” she said proudly. “It’s like how Doctor Kramer’s is Doctor Cram-it.”

“Uh-huh.” He clicked his tongue, then made a shooing motion. “Well, you’ll want to get going. Don’t forget about what we’ve talked about. Come by my office later so we can finalize our agreement.”

“Don’t worry! I won’t!” How  _ could  _ she? She was excited at the opportunity to have the ear of such a big boss person. Her brain itched with all of the things they could talk about. He could be her mentor, helping her boost up the ranks with her brilliantness.

At the doors, her boss waited impatiently, bouncing from one foot to the other.

“Well? What’s taking you so long?” he grumped as she walked up to him

“Doctor Harris and I were talking about…” Oh crude, she didn’t wanna mention her gaff! “About… Uh… Goat butter.”

“Goat butter?” Her boss’ brow furrowed in confusion.

“Yes,” Tara said, doubling down.

“Ugh.” Doctor Lipsky made to slap his forehead, but hit himself in the face with his plate instead. “Ouch!” He rubbed his nose with his free hand while saying, “Great, the old coot’s rants are infecting everyone. That’s probably what Vivian wants to talk with you about: goat butter. Next  _ I’ll _ be some lunatic gushing about my dear old granny’s secret recipes from the olde country!” He blinked a few times before saying to her, “Oh, right, uh, Vivian wanted to chat with you later.” 

“Really? Huh.” Man, she was popular today!

Tara made her way out of the room, leaving room for the doctor to slip through. Changing gears as Tara opened the door for him, the blue man smugly said, “See? I  _ told _ you they’d have lasagna.”

\-------------------------------------------

Tara tentatively traipsed towards the trailblazing technician’s… Office. She couldn’t think of an alliterative word synonymous with ‘office’, so her bit of fun was fizzled. Oh well, it was a good effort!

It was her second stop after finishing her work with Doctor Lipsky for the day, having been dismissed so he could do whatever he did after she left. The first one, with Dr Harris, only took a minute. He just gave her his number as he was leaving his own office. No meeting or anything! Clearly he’d overestimated the time he’d had available today.

She stopped short of knocking, instead standing there like a loon wondering about just what Doctor Porter would have wanted with her. Gathering up her courage, she knocked on the door.

“Come in!” the muffled voice of Dr Porter rang out.

Tara opened the door to the office and gaped. The room was teeny tiny! Bonnie’s closet was bigger! The small desk Vivian had was crammed into a corner while a small bookshelf somehow managed to exist behind a couple of basic office-y like chairs.

The desk was eaten alive with a variety of papers and books, almost definitely for research. Her shelf, on the other hand, was full of various knick-knacks: one of those birds that drinks the water then pops back up; a few pictures; ‘How To’ books, mostly geared towards self-defense? Strange.

One of the pictures caught her eye. A picture of… Vivian and Doctor Director? It looked like they were at some kind of carnival, a friendly arm around each other and Vivian’s face full of cotton candy, bright smiles on their faces. They were dressed all casual-like, Vivian in a nice sundress and Betty in a loose blouse and jeans.

Aw! That stunk! When did the carnival come into town, and how had she not heard about it?

“Heya kiddo!” Vivian said, catching the younger woman’s attention. She motioned for Tara to take a seat. The assistant plopped down in a chair with an audible thud, her limbs dangling like a little kid that got in trouble at recess. The older woman’s brow tilted at her posture. “You okay?”

“Yes! Er, yes, just…” Tara stretched for what to say. “Nervous?”

“What have you got to be nervous abou-.. Oh, right, the psychiatrist thing.” Vivian waved her hand in dismissal. “Don’t worry about that. Betty talked me down. I know you didn’t mean it like you said.”

“Okay…” It took some effort, but she was finally able to relax in her chair, if just a little bit. Clearing her throat, she asked, “So, what did you need to see me for?”

“I was just curious,” Vivian said, playing with a pen on her desk. “It’d been a few weeks since anyone’s seen Drew leave his lab. It was a surprise to see him out and about like that. Just wanted to check in, see how things were going.”

“Weeeelllllllllllllll…” Tara drawled, taking a biiiig breath before she started talking about everything. And boy, did she talk about everything! All the small stuff to the big stuff, even what they ate for lunch the day before. Vivian didn’t react much at all - not even to the dentening! - save for an eyebrow quirk at the ‘timeshare lair’ thing. Tara was nearly out of things to blather about when she finally,  _ finally _ got around to the very bitty last thing that was actually super important.

“We did manage to talk about Shego a bit.”

“Really?” The older woman’s face lit up, just a bit. “Did he explain at all what happened with them?”

“Nope!” Vivian’s face fell, again just a little. Trying to raise her spirits, she noted, “But at least he started talking! He’s really adamant that Shego was just his assistant and nothing else.”

The older woman snorted. “That’s bull.”

“Well,  _ yeah _ . Like, it was the most insincere I’ve ever seen someone since Kim conceded her cheer captain position! He was even cutting himself off from saying ‘friend’ and stuff!”

“Nice.” The sarcasm was strong and completely unmissable. “I bet he says that to all of the girls.”

“Just the ones that ask about Shego,” Tara grumbled.

Vivian sighed, then shrugged. “Well, what can you do but keep at it?”

That was… Not a reaction Tara was expecting. “Just keep at it? What?”

“Yeah,” Vivian said, “just keep at it.” At the assistant’s blank stare, she continued, “You’re on the right track. The hardest part is over, after all: he finally started talking about it! That’s more than any of us can say!”

“You guys tried?” How had no one mentioned that before?

“Well, yeah…” The obvious tone was almost insulting. “Of course we did, kiddo. Drew’s one of the family, after all.”

“One of the family,” Tara screwed her eyebrows together, “I get that, but... It’s just… Oh, I don’t know…” She felt her frustration come to a head, and tried to keep it from her face and voice. She didn’t need to unload on Vivian; she wasn’t frustrated at her, after all!

Tara’s face and voice must have mimicked her feelings more than she’d intended, because Vivian suddenly looked pensive. “I’m sorry, kiddo,” the older woman murmured, “I know that you didn’t sign on for any of this mess with Doctor Lipsky.” She eyed Tara carefully, studiously. “You were looking for a job as a basic old lab assistant, not as a therapist, or a babysitter, or whatever mad scientists need.

“Drew is special, though. He’s…” Doctor Porter struggled with the words. “He needs support, beyond what most assistants can give. What most  _ people _ would give,” she said with a small cringe, shifting in her seat. “I get why you’re upset. I get it. You’re giving a lot more than you expected, for a guy that is always mean and cranky and never seems to really care. But, believe it or not, there  _ is _ a decent guy under that grump, one that I got to know before this whole mess with Shego leaving started. He’s slowly driving himself insane without someone there for him, to help take care of-..”

“I  _ want _ to help!” Tara cried, puffing angry now. This took Vivian aback, making her visibly pause and blink in surprise. She repeated, “I want to help. I  _ like _ helping Doctor D.”

“Doctor D? Isn’t that what Shego used to call him?”

And that piece went into place! “Ohhhhhhh,  _ now _ it makes sense…” Focus! “Anyway, It’s pretty frustrating to me that you’re kinda looking down on me, and that I’m not being kept in the loop! Like, you hired me and left me to do this, but you never actually told me any of what was going on! You and James talk about how we’re a family and stuff…” She put her arms stiff to her side, frustratedly clenching her fists. “I feel like just as much of a black sheep as James said Drew is! I haven’t been told  _ anything _ , and no one’s even made an effort to be friendly or even stop by the lab to see how things are going. This meeting is the  _ first time _ anyone’s asked about things!”

Vivian cringed at that and uttered, “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Tara puffed once more, then sighed as she deflated. Man, being angry was draining!

“Well…” Doctor Porter straightened up in her chair and said, “I see that Drew’s at least rubbing off on you.” She nervously laughed, making Tara frown again. Vivian cleared her throat and said more clearly, “No, seriously, Drew  _ is _ rubbing off on you. I don’t think you would’ve ever said anything like this before you started working with him.”

“Maybe…” Tara trailed off, wondering on how that was relevant to their conversation. Maybe it was the only thing she could think of to recover from how right the assistant was?

“As to your points…” Vivian chewed on her lip for a moment before murmuring, “You have very good points. I never really thought about it. But we did, essentially, leave you to the wolf…”

“Doctor Lipsky isn’t a wolf,” Tara grumbled.

“He certainly was when you first started.”

“What makes you say that?” She would defend Doctor D from this meanness! “If he was a wolf, why leave a newbie to him?”

“Getting an assistant was Betty’s idea,” Vivian said, her eyes glancing away from Tara for a moment and to the bookshelf behind her. “She said he needed someone that he could form a new relationship with, as a subordinate.”

“Okay…?”

“I had reservations…” Doctor Porter trailed off, then shook her head. “Scratch that. I was against it, really. But at that point, I was straight up  _ scared _ .”

“Scared?” Tara tilted her head. “Scared of  _ what _ ?”

“Doctor Lipsky.” At the younger woman’s confused stare, Vivian expounded, “Did you hear that he pulled a death ray on Doctor Wong?”

“Yeah, I did…?” How was that relevant?

“Think about it. Doctor Lipsky pulled a ray that could  _ kill someone _ on the head of directors and didn’t even get fired. He didn’t get in  _ any _ kind of trouble. He just… Kept going as he was, and they  _ let him _ . He was falling, fast, and I was afraid of being the casualty…” The platinum blonde looked away. “But that is no excuse for leaving you in that path.”

“Everything turned out fine,” Tara soothed, realizing just how messy things really were.

“But you could be  _ dead _ right now.” Vivian stared her down. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

“Nope!” The older woman practically pratfalled at that. Recovering, Doctor Porter was clearly going to ask, so Tara beat her to it! “Because I don’t think Doctor Lipsky would’ve ever hurt me, let  _ alone _ kill me.” She rolled her eyes and giggled in amusement.

“Really?” Vivian tilted an eyebrow at that.

“Really,” Tara assured. “Doctor D is scary, but he’s actually a puffball! A really big, scary-looking puffball, but a puffball nonetheless!” She paused, then giggled, "Kinda like my friend Hope's Great Dane, Empress! She was big, her voice was HUGE and sounded  _ so mean _ , but she was just a big, silly puppy!"

“A Great Dane and a mad scientist are two completely different animals. Literally,” Vivian pointed out.

Tara shrugged, "Well, yeah, they're different, but the point is, I don’t think he’d hurt me at all! I think he’s happier, too.”

“I will admit, he seemed to be in better spirits when I talked with him earlier,” the older woman said.

“So you have  _ nothing _ to worry about! Things are getting better!”

Things were silent for a few moments. Then, Vivian smiled. “You know what? I think you’re right.”

“Good! Because I am!”

“Okay, so even if he  _ is  _ better, I think that-..”

A loud buzzing interrupted what Vivian was about to say. Blinking, they both turned their attention to a small cellphone that was sitting on the scientist’s desk. Vivian gasped as she saw the name, ‘Patch’, and caught sight of the time. “Oh my gosh! We’ve been talking for over a half-hour!”

“Really?!” Goodness, time flies when you’re settling differences!

“I’ll have to call her back in a minute. Sorry, but I have to ask you to leave…” The older woman motioned to the door.

“Will do!”

“Ugh.  _ Please _ don’t say those words. Makes me think of… Someone…” Vivian shuddered.

“...uh… Okay?” Tara wondered while she opened the door on who in the world would make someone like Doctor Porter react like that? “Thanks for your time!”

“No, thank  _ you _ for helping us out like you are,” Vivian happily retorted as she got up and scooted around to her office’s door. “I’m certain that Drew’s not only getting better now, but that he’s back on track for at least some of his projects.”

The younger woman flounced out into the hallway, feeling grrrrrreat! Things went awesomely!

She jumped as behind her the doctor said, “Oh, one more thing…” Tara flipped around on her foot, partially frozen in her victory pose. “You’re doing good, Tara.” Vivian gave her one final smile before shutting the door.


	6. Chapter 6

“..-so then I said “She went to the little girl’s cabin” and bam! Screaming! Ohhhh~” Tara spooky whispered, wiggling her free fingers at her boss. They were currently seated at the crumply desk on the crooked stools, looking through new articles on biofeedback therapy that could possibly be used towards the doctor’s plant project.

“Whoop de do.” He waved his highlighter about in a loop. “Like I’m scared by your little ghost story.”

“But it’s true!” Tara scooted closer to Doctor D, her eyes wide. “And then, after Ron lectured Kim on the buddy system, we found a mutant footprint!”

“A mutant footprint?” This seemed to catch his interest. “What kind of creature did it belong to?”

“Ron’s old camp buddy,” she shrugged. “ _ That _ part isn’t a scary part, though!”

“Ron? Who’s Ron?”

“Kim’s BFBF? The blond guy that always thwarted you?”

The blue man paused, brow knitted in thought, highlighter hitting his chin and leaving streaks of color. “Oh, that guy. I can never remember his name… Are you sure it was Ron and not Don?”

“Positive!” Tara said.

“Anyway, what mutated the camp buddy?” Doctor Lipsky’s attention was entirely on her now, his paper left on the table, forgotten. Poor paper!

She thought hard on it. “I think Ron said it was the lake? It happened again the next year, so there must be something still wrong with the kinda-clean lake.”

“Oh really?” There was a rasp of interest in his voice. “Do you happen to know where this particular lake is?”

“It was at Camp Gottagri--..”

**BAM!** “LIPSKY!”

They both swiveled in their seats to look towards the door, Tara in surprise and Doctor Lipsky in consternation, his forehead slumping in grump. In had burst Doctor Harris and Doctor Director She could tell it was Doctor Director from the outfit, even with her wearing a GJ helmet. She must’ve just gotten back from test riding a rocket, or something cool like that!

Her boss rolled his eyes. “What  _ now _ ? Can’t you see we’re busy?”

Dr Director began, “Doctor Lipsky, we’ve heard-..”

“One of your conditions to becoming a scientist here was to leave behind all of your previous villain lifestyle!” Doctor Harris interrupted, fuming.

“Yes…?” Drew’s expression seemed strangely guarded. “What  _ about _ it?”

“We’re heard that you still have-..” Doctor Harris was silenced by a glare from the one-eyed woman.

Clearing her throat, Doctor Director said, “It has come to our attention that you may still have a hand in the world of villainy.”

“Oh really?” His eyebrow tilted at that.

“Yes. Following a tip we received, we looked into your assets…” Doctor Lipsky made an audible gulp and began sweating, a feat since it was actually pretty cold in there. “There seems to be an… Irregularity.”

“An irregularity?” He let out a single high-pitched laugh. “Who would’ve thought?”

“We know about the timeshare lair!” Doctor Harris grumbled loudly, clearly not able to keep quiet in light of the offense that was committed. Tara had  _ no idea _ what was wrong with having a timeshare anything, but was sure that it must’ve been something bad.

The expression on Doctor D’s face fell hard at that utterance. “Oh.”

“‘Oh’ indeed,” the one-eyed woman said sternly. “You know that the only thing keeping you in the grace of both GJ and the space center currently is your commitment to-..”

“Fine! I’ll cancel my subscription to HenchCo’s timeshares!” Doctor Lipsky interrupted angrily. “Will that make you happy?”

“Perfectly so.” Doctor Director got more in his face. “Though what would make me even happier would be if you made sure that  _ all _ of your assets were to be released.”

“I’m not getting rid of my real estate!” Drew declared loudly, puffing up. “Those are  _ mine _ ! I bought them fair and square.” He paused. “Well, most of them, anyway.”

“We know,” the director said, waving her hand, “and we don’t mind those. What we  _ do _ mind are the  _ secret _ spaces you have that were previously dedicated to storing and basing villainous activity out of.”

Doctor D harrumphed. “Well, aren’t we just a Snoopy McSnooperson!”

“Yes, I am,” she replied flatly.

The doctor was clearly taken off-guard by her agreement as he blinked and growled and snorted at her. “Nnnnngh, argh, just… Nnnnngh!”

“ _ Doctor _ Lipsky,” the balding man said grumpily, “we will  _ not _ tolerate any besmirching of the center’s reputation! Letting a known criminal work here  _ alone _ is nearly more than we can tolerate. Don’t give us reason to  _ terminate _ your employment here. We already regret hiring you, after all!”

“I’ll terminate you…” Drew grumbled quietly, only loud enough for his assistant to hear.

“What was that?” Doctor Harris asked.

“Nothing!” The blue man snorted again and growled out, “Well? Was that it, Doctor Director?”

“Yes it was.” Doctor Director motioned at Doctor Harris. “That concludes our business, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does…” he replied grumpily. An evil eye was spared for her boss as he added, “If you have any more sins to admit, now’s the time to do it!”

“I don’t  _ have _ anything else!” Doctor D replied, exasperated. “You  _ took _ it all!”

“Good.” With that, the two doctors left the room.

The doors slammed shut with a resounding thunk, the noise after the tense discussion making Tara jump. Just a little!

“Nnnnngh…” Her boss looked like the Grinch as he tossed his highlighter on the ground in frustration. Tara belatedly realized that he’d talked with them with the marks on his chin the entire time! Oh no! That must’ve made him look  _ super _ bad!

Seeing how upset she was, her boss seemed to calm down as he grumbled, “Don’t worry, they’re not concerned about  _ you _ .” 

“Why would they be?” she asked. “They were talking to you the entire time.”

“Don’t  _ remind _ me,” Doctor D said, putting a hand over his eyes.

“What was that even about?” Tara queried. “Timeshare lair?” He’d mentioned it once before to her. And then she’d mentioned it to Vivian… Had Vivian told Doctor Director? She should’ve made the older woman pinky promise not to tell anyone about that!

“It’s a place where a villain can go if they’re between lairs or just want to lay low,” her boss explained. “I just don’t know how they found out…!”

“Don’t they monitor that stuff?”

“If they would’ve found it, it would’ve been in the initial assessment after I quit villainy!” he growled. “They would’ve had no reason to snoop like they did unless someone told them to look.” Doctor D snarled, “I like having options! You never know when something will go belly-up. When I find out who tattled on me…!” He made a strangling motion.

Tara suddenly felt very, very small.

\-----------------------------------------------------

“I messed up super hard!”

Tara was, again, consulting Mr Scrumptilicious on her current life problems in her room at her parent’s house. Namely, not getting in trouble for tattling on her boss to his boss.

“I mean, I didn’t  _ mean _ to…” she trailed off, flopping back on her fluffy yellow bed with Mr Scrumptilicious curled in one arm. “I just wanted to tell Vivian everything that we talked about!”

Her hot dog friend whispered conspiratorially in her ear, “Vivian wouldn’t bring it up if she was the informant. He’ll only find out you told if you tell him yourself.”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“No no no! That’s the path to bad times! Do you want to have a bad time, Tara?” he asked her, giving her his patented blank stare and frozen, kind-of creepy smile.

“Well, no… But…” She pouted. “It makes me feel like a loser.”

“I think you’re pretty snazzy!” Mr Scrumptilicious said, patting Tara on the head.

“Thank you,” she replied, scratching her head with her free hand.

“You’re wel-..”

_ Oh ohhhhh~ yeah~ _

Tara’s phone, laying next to her on the bed as it normally did, began singing a specific, heart-stopping song that was only used for one contact on her phone.

_ Bonnie _

Oh goodness, Bonnie was calling her back! ...after two weeks. Two weeks was a long time. It made it pretty obvious that Tara had no room in Bonnie’s life. None. No space.

Should she even bother answering? Would this be better going to voicemail?

_ Bite the bullet. _

She answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Tara,” the snobby voice of her best friend said.

“Hi Bonnie!” Even just hearing her voice made Tara’s heart flip-flop with joy. Ignoring it, Tara grumpily asked, “What  _ took _ you so long to call me back?”

There was a pause. “Like, I didn’t  _ forget _ , and you aren’t a loser, but…” Tara sat, hushed, as Bonnie harrumphed and continued, “I’ve been way busy. I’m hanging out with a different crowd now.”

“A different crowd?” What did that mean?

“This crowd is a lot more adult than our petty high school groups,” Bonnie said in her snobbery voice that she used when she was trying to sound like a know-it-all. “I’m not sure how well you’d fit in with them…”

“I’ve grown up a lot, B,” Tara assured her BFF, trying to ignore the desperate scrabbling her chest was making at the idea of being discarded.

“I’m not so sure,  _ Tara _ ,” the tanned woman sniped, “what with you using our old nicknames.”

“What are nicknames for other than for people who’re really close?” the blonde said pointedly, irritation creeping into her voice now. It was like talking with Vivian all over again! “Heck, all of-.. Well,  _ most _ of us at the space center call each other by our first names  _ and _ nicknames, and you can’t tell me that no one there’s an adult!”

“The space center?” A mote of interest crawled into Bonnie’s voice. “You got hired at the space center?”

“Well, yeah!” Had it really been that long since the two of them talked? “I’m a personal assistant to Doctor Lipsky!”

“Doctor who? Eh, whatever…” Bonnie seemingly changed gears at Tara’s comeback; she could hear it in her BFF’s voice. Point scored! “Well, T…” The blonde’s heart swelled at hearing her nickname, “I think I have an idea that, like, could let me see how well you’d fit in with my new crowd…”

“Really?” Darn, she couldn’t keep all of the mountains of hope and wonder out of her voice!

“Really,” the voice on the other line said with some sincerity. “Like, I’m having a party in a week and a bunch of my new crowd have already RSVP’d. Not  _ all _ of them…” mutter mutter smarmy wench named Leon? “...so there’s some wiggle room for you to show up.”

Oh boy! When was the last time Tara got to go to a party? It must have been the post-graduation one Bonnie threw with Junior’s help! That one had been sooooo much fun...!

“How should I dress?” Tara asked, mentally going through the wardrobe she currently had available.

“Just, like, dress nice. Don’t go overboard; this isn’t prom or a wedding. Heck, I’ll even let you have a plus one! Bring your boss or whatever, I’m sure he’d be a  _ fascinating _ guest for everyone to talk with. Show up fashionably late; I’ll text you the time and place. And  _ don’t _ embarrass me.”

_ Click _

\-------------------------------------------------------------------

“-..and  _ that’s _ how I got my scar!”

“Wow! That was a crazy story,” Tara exclaimed as she set down another random piece of tech that the doctor had pulled out of the walker. “Do you think that could ever happen again?”

“Not a chance!” he said, laughing. “I’m too smart to have that happen a  _ second _ time!”

“Smartness doesn’t seem to be the reason why…” Tara said haltingly.

“Bah! What do you know?”

“Lots of stuff,” she defended. Luckily, he didn’t press her on it, instead rolling his eyes and stuffing the upper half of his body into the walker again. Tara didn’t think she could handle a pop quiz right then!

Today, they were digging into the main body of the walker. Most of it didn’t make  _ any _ sense to Tara; crystals and weird gears and circuit boards that didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before. They somehow made sense to Doctor D, as he told her what to write down. It was mostly nonsense words and symbols, though! Clearly, it was shorthand for other stuff. What else  _ could _ they be?

His legs waved in the air for a moment before vines popped out of the body of the walker and wrenched their creator out. In his hands was a huuuuuuge cable, one that was bigger in diameter than her head!

“What in the world is  _ that _ for?” Tara boggled as he got his footing.“ _ This _ is an ohm compensator. It helps to increase and decrease the voltage at will that one can get out of a constant current,” he said like it was obvious.

Ohm compensator? Like ohm’s law? Compensating for a universal law with a wire? She was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked…

Her face must have betrayed her thoughts as he smugly said, “That’s why  _ I’m _ the doctor and  _ you’re _ the assistant.”

Silence fell on the two of them as he began to inspect the materials the wire was made out of. There wasn’t a wire stripper in the  _ world _ big enough to talk that thing, so there would need to be an entrance cut made to start off with… But could someone make one that was big enough? How many people would have to operate it?

As her mind wandered, she suddenly and definitely not on purpose thought back to the conversation she’d had with Bonnie. It was weird, to say the least. It was strange that her BFF would suffer someone as socially inept as a scientist type - she couldn’t even handle  _ Ron Reger _ \- yet she wanted her boss to show up to the party? Maybe the new crowd was a bunch of intellectual types? Having a supersmart scientist from the Middleton Space Center would be quite a party boost if that were the case!

But… How could she convince him to go?

“Heya, super duper boss guy?” she started, trying to butter him up right away.

“What do you want?” he asked back.

Drat! How did he know? Was he developing psychic powers like James?

“I, ah, have a party that I’m going to.”

“Okay…?” He let go of the large cable and stared at her. After a moment, he frowned and made a motion for her to keep going.

“I have a plus one invite, so I was wondering… If you’d come with me…?” Even  _ she _ cringed at her poor delivery. Get it together, Tara!

“You want me to be your plus one to a  _ party _ ?” he asked as a strange echo-y noise catching Tara’s attention.

“What was that?” she asked, looking around in concern.

“I didn’t hear anything,” he grumbled. “Anyway, don’t you want to take some ‘spankin’’ young guy or someone that you could  _ actually date _ ?”

“Technically, we  _ could  _ date,” Tara pointed out.

There was that noise again!

“Bah! Like I’d bother with someone as young as you,” he said roughly. He passionately uttered, “I want someone who’s older, with more  _ fire _ and snark and-..” The doctor suddenly cut himself off and coughed before awkwardly saying, “In short, no, we couldn’t.”

“Okay.” She didn’t understand what he didn’t understand about the word ‘could’. It didn’t mean  _ would _ , it meant that they  _ could _ , as in it was an option. A far stretch of one, but one nonetheless.

“..-lo ..-lo ..-lo…” There was that noise again  _ again _ !

“There’s definitely some kind of noise...” she said to her boss, tilting an ear up to listen more closely.

“You’re hearing things,” he assured her.

“..-there? ..-there? ..-there?” Tara heard it more clearly that time. It was a voice! Someone was asking something…

“Hello?” she loudly asked back.

“Talking to the void? How cute,” Doctor D mocked. “I suppose next you’ll tell me there’s a gho-..”

“Hello? Hello? Hello?” a voice echoed back.

“A ghost,” her boss said flatly, eyes wide. “That is a ghost.”

A ghost? Oh boy! First person to encounter a recordable supernatural phenomenon!

“Cool!” she exclaimed loudly, letting it echo in the large room.

“Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” It sounded louder now.

Her boss’ irises shrank to itty bitty specs. He then, very calmly, began to climb into the belly of the walker.

“Where are you going?” she asked him more quietly.

“Hiding! What  _ else _ would I be doing?” he hissed, peeking out for a moment before resuming hiding in his excellent hiding spot.

“What about me?” Tara pouted as another round of the previous question resounded, even louder than before.

“Find your own hiding place!”

“No fair!”

“Are you here?” The voice was clear now, with the echo-y note out of it. It sounded familiar, but no… It couldn’t be! Did she fall to an accident earlier that day, to be haunting them like a ghost as she was?

Oh, wait. No. There, behind the pile of busted power tools, appeared Doctor Porter. She wasn’t a ghost! Tara let out a breath that she was holding.

Waving, she said, “Hi Vivian!”

“‘Vivian’?” her boss’ voice rang from the walker’s belly. Sticking his head out, he scanned until he also noticed the svelte blonde peering at them from next to the pile. “Oh. It’s you.” Doctor Lipsky crawled out of the walker and set himself carefully down on the floor.

“Hello to you too,” Vivian said with some mirth. “Who were you expecting?”

“A gho-..”

“No one!” Doctor D said quickly, cutting Tara off. Changing gears, he asked, “What in the world does the brain trust need now?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking…” The older woman trailed off, then began again, as if nervous, “Wanted to check to see if you guys wanted some help.”

“What?” Her boss boggled at her, confused at the words that had come from her mouth.

“Would you guys be up for an extra hand?” Vivian asked, walking a little closer to the Lorwardian quadruped.

Doctor D opened his mouth angrily for a moment, but paused as his eyes darted to Tara for a teensy second. He closed his mouth and snorted. “I  _ suppos _ _e_ you can…  _ If  _ you think you can keep up!” He nodded his head towards the younger blonde. “ _ She’s _ been with me for every step, but you’ll be coming in blind. Don’t expect us to wait on you to catch up!”

Was that a compliment? Tara was certain that was a compliment, as backwards as it was. She beamed.

Vivian smirked, tilting an eyebrow in challenge as she strolled up to where they were working. “I think I can handle it…”


	7. Chapter 7

Tara was super duper happy! She was currently enjoying a moment of peace  _ in the lab, alone _ ! Sitting at the desk, she sighed as she straightened the papers that were laying around. Ever since Vivian started helping, things were going really well! Doctor D had gone off with Vivian to her office, supposedly to look at one of the research articles from her desk. She totally knew better, though… 

Over the last several days, Doctor Porter had been helping to dismantle the rest of the Lorwardian walker. Her expertise was, surprisingly, less than Doctor D’s as far as knowing what went into the walker, but she was still doing well enough to be a great help. The two scientists went on for hours at a time on a variety of science-y topics.  _ Now _ Tara understood what James had meant those few weeks ago… Even though Tara was smart and stuff, there was still a lot,  _ a lot _ , that was above her head. She simply couldn’t keep up like Vivian did with Drew!

Which brought Tara to what she knew was going on was how happy the two of them were just talking with each other. They were totally hitting on each other! She knew it was true! There was no other explanation for why they enjoyed hanging out so much now.

Oh! What would their babies look like? She pictured slightly blue blonde children, with deep dark black eyes and cat-like smirks…

The sound of the door opening caught her attention. In slunk... Doctor Harris? Slunk was definitely the right word. She could even picture a box over him to hide him from enemies. He adjusted his toupee as he quietly shut the door to the large lab.

“Hiya Doctor Harris!” Tara chirped, waving at him from the table she was seated at.

He jumped and squawked, turning to her like he was a man possessed with wild eyes and a snarl on his face. She could practically  _ see _ the exclamation mark over his head.

“Who is-..?!” The balding man cut himself off when he saw that it was Tara who’d greeted him. He frowned for a moment before calming himself with a cough and saying, “Ah, Miss Blie. Good to see you.”

“Good to see you too!” she replied. “What brings you to Doctor D’s lab?”

“I noticed that  _ Doctor _ Lipsky and Miss Porter were in a deep discussion by her office over some kind of nonsense about whether an ohm compensator can actually exist…” Doctor Harris snorted. His eyebrows raising, he noted, “It made me think of the lab, and how it may be empty…”

Tara gasped. How could she have forgotten? “I’m soooooo sorry! I forgot to let you know when Doctor D leaves the lab!”

“That’s quite alright, child,” he said in a condescending tone. How rude! “I’m certain you didn’t do it on purpose.” He walked farther into the lab and asked, “So, are they still out?”

“Yup!” She conspiratorially whispered, “When they get into a discussion like that, it takes them  _ forever _ to stop! They’ll probably be busy for a while.”

“Perfect!” Doctor Harris clapped his hands. “I was hoping to, ah, catch up with what  _ Doctor _ Lipsky was up to…” He quickly added, “But with how nervous he gets around others looking at his work, I didn’t want to do it while he was around.”

“Ohhhh.” That made sense. “So you just wanna make sure he’s on track!”

“Precisely!” He beamed at her. Walking over, the doctor asked, “Would you be able to help me out, and guide me around to his various projects?”

OH! That’s awesome! “I’d totally  _ love _ to help out!”

“Perfect. Now then…” Doctor Harris waved his hand at the nearby plant display. “How is his plant project going? Has he explained how, exactly, he was able to make semi-sentient plants, and has he reproduced his efforts?”

“Huh?”  _ That _ wasn’t his project! “What are you talking about? Isn’t he supposed to be making a plant that can survive on the moon?”

“What the-..?!” he balked. “Survive on the-..” Sputtering, he asked, “Who in the  _ world _ would think that sort of thing was possible?”

Tara cringed. “Uhm, that’s what we’ve been working on.”

Doctor Harris growled. “Just as I expected. He probably can’t reproduce his results.”

“I wouldn’t say that…” Tara pointed at the top tier, where the newest batch of plants were resting. “Those plants are definitely alive in the wiggly way.”

“Hmph.” He crossed his arms. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

See it? Well, that was easy enough!

“Give me a second.” Tara went over and pushed the button that rotated the tiers, bringing the top one down to the ground. In it, rows of daffodils and brown-eyed Susans sat, waiting for their father to begin his work with them again. She went over and nudged her favorite, one she’d dubbed ‘Bob’, on the side.

“Wakey-wakey~” she sing-songed. “Time to show off for the big boss man~”

It flopped around for a few seconds, clearly upset from being woken up, before swirling up and around Tara with curiosity.

“What the…?” Doctor Harris boggled. “How is it doing that?”

“I dunno…” Tara shrugged, suddenly realizing how silly she looked at not knowing more. “Normally when he’s doing the technical stuff, I’m looking through research articles for something to help add to the project.”

“Isn’t this supposed to be your specialty?” His disapproval made her cringe.

“Yes…? But…” she tried to recover “Doctor Lipsky assigned me as he needed. He didn’t need my help with his plants.”

“If you want to be of  _ any _ value, you’ll get more hands-on with his work,” he warned, and edge in his voice. It made Tara audibly gulp. The brown-eyed Susan ‘looked’ between the two of them, clearly confused.

“It’s okay, Bob. You did great!” she assured it. It tilted to the side for a moment before making a shrugging motion and coiling back into the soil where it had been resting.

“Now that I’ve experienced the  _ utter disappointment _ of his plant project,” Utter disappointment? Didn’t the plants moving accomplish the actual goal? “I’d like you to show me to his next biggest project.”

Tara decided not to correct him on the implied idea that the plants were the doctor’s biggest project and, instead, simply began walking towards the Lorwardian walker. Doctor Harris followed, puffed up and angry.

When they pulled up the the walker, the doctor was visibly stunned.

“How did he manage to take it apart like that?” he asked, mouth flapping in awe. “I’ve been in constant contact with Kennedy and know for a  _ fact _ that they haven’t even managed to crack the shell yet!”

“Well…” The blonde pointed to several spots where the vines had done their work, hoping that the doctor wouldn’t think that she was tattling. “Doctor Lipsky had to force the walker open with his vines.” As an afterthought, she added, “And his head.”

“And his-..” Doctor Harris suddenly looked concerned. “Are you sure he forced it open?”

“Yeah! I was here when he did some of it, after all!” At least this time she didn’t disappoint him with not knowing stuff.

“That’s…” He seemed to be struggling to find the right word. Before he could succeed, though, a loud thud echoed throughout the room.

“Sounds like they’re back,” Tara noted. Doctor Harris looked perturbed for a second, then set his face in a stern frown.

“Follow me,” he said, motioning with his finger to the front of the lab. “It’s time to have a  _ talk _ with  _ Doctor _ Lipsky on his progress…”

She gulped as she trailed behind him like a duckling following its mother. No matter what, she was certain someone was going to be in trouble. That stunk!

“Tara? We’re back…” she could hear Vivian saying loudly, clearly trying to get the words to echo clearly through the room.

“ _ DOCTOR LIPSKY _ !” The sudden loud screechy shout caught Tara off-guard and made her jump! Goodness! Couldn’t he have given a warning before he screamed like that?

“Oh great,” she could hear her boss say as they rounded about the last pile of stuff that was between them and the door. “What’s he doing here?”

“I’m examining your progress is what I’m doing,” Doctor Harris said, stomping over to Doctor Lipsky. “And I must say, I am highly unimpressed!”

“Are you ever  _ not _ unimpressed?” Drew asked in an obvious tone.

“I am when there’s reason for it. Which there isn’t here.” He sniffed. “I’ve inspected both of your big projects and find them lacking.”

“Lacking?” Vivian seemed nonplussed. “Are you sure you actually looked at his work?”

“I did indeed,” Doctor Harris confirmed. “And as I said, I was not impressed.” He gave Doctor D the evil eye. “I heard from your  _ assistant _ that you’re tackling some, some  _ fool _ challenge to make plants that can survive on the moon?”

“You heard right!” Doctor D held his chin high. “I’m trying to do something that could actually be a benefit to humanity at some point.”

“Really?” The skepticism in Vivian’s voice made him falter.

Looking away and kicking at the ground, he added, “And, maybe, just MAYBE, I thought it’d be ‘cool’ to have the moon covered in my flowers.”

“And you couldn’t stick to your actual project  _ why _ ?” Doctor Harris pressed.

“Because it’s easy and  _ boring _ !” Doctor D exclaimed with an eye roll. “I’ve already managed to make sentient plants. Why would I make  _ more _ of them for no reason other than make more of them?”

“Semi-sentient,” Doctor Harris suddenly insisted. “They are not cognizant, thus they are not fully sentient.”

“ _ Sentient _ plants,” the blue man repeated, frowning. “They can think.”

“With no brains? Impossible,” the balding man said, waving his hand dismissively.

“Hmph! Say what you want, I don’t care. Only one of us is right, and I know it’s me!” Doctor Lipsky declared. He was pointing a finger in the air like a silly goose.

“I’m your boss, and I’m  _ telling you _ you’re  _ wrong _ ,” Doctor Harris growled. Tara’s boss snarled wordlessly in reply.

“Please, can we calm down?” Vivian said, stepping in between them. “It’s a bit silly to argue about something so trivial right now. Can we focus on the fact that the newest batch of plants Drew produced can move autonomously? Which was the original goal of Drew’s assignment?”

Both men stared each other down for a few more seconds. Doctor Harris broke eye contact first, his gaze turning to the tiers of plants. “That is true…” he offered. “However you managed it, those plants can move on their own. You’ve reproduced it…” he narrowed his eyes “...but I’m expecting you to be able to teach others how to do it as well. I’ve heard about your vines being able to penetrate the shell of the walkers.”

Doctor Lipsky’s eyes widened for a second, before he angrily glanced at Tara.

Uh oh.

“So I think that being able to show others how to make it would be beneficial for everyone. I know that these vines will be essential to deconstructing and understanding Lorwardian technology,” Doctor Harris finished.

Vivian and Drew looked at each other. Weird. They looked… Concerned?

“Doctor Harris…” the blonde scientist started, “Drew and I’ve been working on this together. Him for a while, me for the last few days. I really think we’re on the right track to-..”

“This is  _ far _ beyond the capabilities of a so-called  _ mad scientist _ , his assistant, and a junior scientist.” He was practically sneering as he said that! How could he talk down to them like that? Weren’t they all a family? “This should be left to the  _ real _ professionals.”

“Like yourself?” Vivian asked, disgust clear in her voice.

“Precisely!” He straightened his suit, readjusting the cuffs and tie, before saying, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with the rest of the board of directors next week that I must prepare for.” He narrowed his eyes. “I think you know what the topic of conversation will be about.” With that, he turned on his heels and left.

Thunk, ka-clunk

The door settled in its frame, leaving the noise of it echoing through the room. Silence reigned for a few seconds.

Then Drew turned towards Tara and cried in his over-the-top yell, “MISSY!”

“Yes Doctor D?” she asked calmly, internally cringing and gulping because she knew what it was going to be about.

“I can’t  _ believe _ you let that, that  _ snake _ in here and even  _ showed him around _ ! What were you  _ thinking _ ?!”

Oh! Not what she’d thought. That one was an easy one! “I was thinking he’s your boss! And the boss of my boss is still my boss.” She nodded, her logic as solid and whole as Bonnie’s ego.

“No! That’s wrong!” he growled. “The boss of your boss is  _ no one _ because  _ I’m _ the only boss that matters!”

“But...” Tara tilted her head in confusion. “That would mean that I shouldn’t even listen to Doctor Wong! And she’s the big boss lady!”

“Exactly! You’re  _ my _ assistant! You should be  _ acting like it _ and be  _ on my side _ no matter WHAT!”

“Calm down, Drew.” Vivian again stepped between the people in the room arguing.

He turned to her, nostrils flaring. “Don’t tell me to calm down! I’m well within my rights to be angry!”

Vivian sighed and said despondently, “For once, you’re right.”

That only seemed to irritate him  _ even more _ . “You can’t even bother arguing with me! Useless!”

“Hey now!” Tara interrupted, offended. “Just ‘cause Doctor Harris is a grouch and a jerk doesn’t mean that you can call us names!”

“It means  _ PRECISELY THAT _ !” he yelled, glaring at her. “You all can’t do  _ anything _ to help me! At all! You’re USELESS! USE! LESS!”

He continued, bellowing, “If Shego had been here, she’d have stopped him! She would have made him stop being such a prick and let me do my work! She would have stood there and been all cool and calm and know exactly what to do! She’d have made him sorry! She would have...” His voice wavered, his anger clearly fizzling out as he repeated, “She’d have…”

Doctor D turned away, choking on the words in his throat now. He was crumbling into himself, like the Incredible Bulk after he calmed down. But Tara was pretty sure that the blue man didn’t have powers like that…?

“Oh no…” Vivian sighed, turning towards her for a moment. “Kiddo, I think that you need to leave us for a few…”

“Why?” If there was something wrong with Doctor Lipsky, she wanted to be there to help!

“Trust me on this,” she replied as they watched the bad doctor drop to his knees, shoulders shaking.

“I don’t understand why he’s so upset about Shego…” Tara said, looking between Vivian and Drew. “It’s so weird that he’s caught up on her like this… It's like he loves… Her…” Realization washed over her. “ _ Ohhhhhh _ .”

“Quiet!” Vivian hissed, looking over at Doctor D for a second. Either he didn’t hear or didn’t care about what they were saying as there didn’t seem to be any other reaction other than pathetic sniffling crying stuff. “This isn’t something for you to have to deal with.”

“Why not?” she asked, trying not to pout.

“This is more of an adult thing,” Vivian said.

“Well, it’s a good thing I  _ am _ an adult,” Tara sternly replied.

Vivian’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times before she finally managed to say, “I guess you’re right…”

“You’re darn right I’m right!” 

“You- you lackwits can’t even comfort me about losing my Shego ri-i-iiiiight,” he cried snottily, as in literal snot.

Oh. I guess he  _ did _ hear her.

“It’s okay, Doctor D,” Tara said, walking over and patting his back.

“No it’s not! It’s  _ not _ okay!” He snuffled, “Shego left, and she hates me! I can’t believe she hates me!”

“I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that.” Vivian dropped down to look at Doctor D in the face.

“Yes she did! She even said “Drakken, I can’t stand to be around you! You’re insane and you make  _ me _ insane!” when we were arguing the last time we talked!”

“See? She didn’t say she hated you!” the younger woman assured him. “You know Shego better than us; does that mean that she hates you?”

“What does it  _ matter _ if it really means she hates me or not? What would  _ you _ think if the one person you  _ cared about most _ left you and told you that they couldn’t stand you?” he asked spitefully, wiping the tears from one side of his face.

Tara’s heart bounced for a second, thinking to a few weeks ago about...

Vivian flinched, likely imagining something like the same thing, and stammered, “Betts wouldn’t-.. I mean, that wouldn’t happen.” She wrapped a hand around the one he was using to balance himself as he squatted. “You know why?”

“Because you’re hot?” he asked plainly, jealously.

“Because the people I care about care about me in return.” Vivian squeezed his hand. “I put my love into people who  _ deserve _ it. And if they were to ever act like that, then they weren’t worth all the effort I put in.”

“What do you do after that? When they finally  _ ditch you _ , and all of that effort was wasted?”

“It hurts. A lot.” The older woman cringed. “But that doesn’t mean the effort was wasted… We have the memories that we’d built. Thinking back on everything, can you honestly say that she hated every moment of it?”

He sniffled, wiping his other eye. “No…”

“And would you take back everything, even those good moments, so you would’ve never even known her?”

“...no…”

“Those moments were genuine! Don’t forget that! There was real care there. And yeah, it  _ does _ hurt, and it  _ can’t _ be fixed, at least not right away. There is a reason that ‘time heals all wounds’ is a saying…”

“Man, Vivian, you really  _ did _ know what to say!” Tara exclaimed, looking at the older woman in awe. “It’s like you know what he’s going through!”

There was an awkward pause. Vivian looked away, biting her lip, and Doctor D’s eyes widened considerably.

“ _ Oh _ ,” he said quietly.

“So yeah…” The apparent junior scientist looked back at Drew. “It sucks. It sucks  _ hard _ . But time will help.”

Doctor D gave one final long, loud snort. “Promise me that it will get better?”

Vivian shook her head fondly and smirked. “Yeah, Drew. I promise, it’ll get better.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea what I'm doing


	8. Chapter 8

"Welp, that does it for me." Vivian streeeeetched her arms up and over her head. She set down the wire strippers and super advanced wire she'd been holding and stood up. "I'm gonna go relax a bit before tomorrow hits." She paused, then offered, "Did either of you wanna tag along?"

"Ohhh! Do you mean a team exercise? We could go bowling~" her boss lilted.

"Bowling?" The older woman made a face. "No way! That's not my crowd at all. What I meant was more popping a movie in and chomping on some popcorn or something in my apartment, maybe mocking the movie a bit."

His expression dropped like a stone, from giddy to frowning super hard. "Hmph!" He waved his hand dismissively as he said, "I have better things to do than sit and watch some teeny-bop angsty drivel."

"Like what?" Somehow she sounded both sceptical and curious at the same time! How did she do that?

"I… Ah… Nnnngh…" Doctor D snorted before crossing his arms and pouted, "It's a secret."

Vivian stared for a moment, then shrugged. "Whatever." She walked in the direction of the door, "Don't forget Drew: things will get better."

"Of course they will!" he said with conviction as he examined a piston-like piece from the Lorwardian walker with a giant set of zoomy goggles.

They'd continued their work even after Doctor Harris' declaration. Even if he was going to try and rain on their parade, they were doing SCIENCE! Science didn't care who did what, as long as you did it right! It was _history_ that cared about who and what. And history was written by the winners! So because science always has the leading edge be the winner, that meant that they would be winners by history's standards too.

"See you kiddos later!" A couple dozen seconds later, Tara heard her shut the door. The heavy 'thud' echoed throughout the room, somehow louder than normal even with the easy way she'd probably shut the door.

"What does she mean 'kiddo'?" Doctor D grumbled, glancing in the direction of the doorway in his peeved sort of way. "I'm older than her by a good decade or two!"

"Don't talk about age when it comes to women!" Tara cried, scandalized. She personally didn't really understand what was so wrong about asking about someone's age, but she knew that a lot of people really really hated talking about it.

"I don't get that stigma," her boss said, rolling his eyes. She mentally gasped; he'd read her mind! James must've been rubbing off on him. "It's not like anyone cares!"

"I bet there are people that DO care," Tara said seriously, "or else there wouldn't be such a thing as that saying!"

" _What_ saying?"

"You don't ask a woman her age." She nodded.

"That's not a saying!" Doctor D protested.

"Is so!"

"Argh!" He scrabbled his hands through his hair, the tool click-clacking against his mini-mullet.

Things were quiet for a moment, Tara continuing to dismantle the now familiar wiring sections at the tip of the walker while Drew continued to take apart the teeny pieces of the kind-of piston.

Her boss broke the silence. "I was thinking about that party thing you'd mentioned."

"Oh!" She'd totally forgotten about that! Good thing she had easy-to-create outfits in her closet from her initial job interview crazy shopping spree. There'd be no _way_ she'd have time to do a full clothing montage now!

"I suppose…" Doctor D twiddled his fingers together and around his spindly tool. Suddenly taking on a snobby tone, he said, "I _suppose_ I could come with you…"

"Yay~" Tara cheered. This was going to be awe-some~

"BUT!"

She paused mid-celebration and stared at him.

"But," he said again, "I'm doing you a favor. You owe me one in the future!"

"Awww…" Tara deflated. That wasn't fair! She argued, "But, but it's a party! You'll get free food and everything!"

"Hmph!" Drew crossed his arms defiantly. "If I want free food, I'll go to the lunchroom!"

Curses! He had her there.

She harrumphed back. "Fiiiine, I'll owe you one…"

Doctor D perked right up at her admission. He wrung his hands as he giggled, "Hehehe…" At her confused glance, he said, "Just thinking of the possibilities."

Uh-oh. What was he thinking of making her do? Immediately the image of her pulling him in a carriage, him with a horse whip and her stuck in front, straining against the leash that attached her to the super heavy carriage. A wheeless carriage, with ski legs instead.

Oh! She could be Rudolph!

"You'd have to make me a glowing nose," the blonde said with finality. She could never be Rudolph without one!

"What?" He tilted an eyebrow at her. "...sometimes I worry about what goes on in that head of yours."

"That's not a very nice thing to say," she said with a pout.

"And I'm not a very nice person!" he retorted.

"No you aren't!" Tara harrumphed and began to concentrate super hard on her project. Mean jerk of a boss, wrecking her happy buzz with his party crash behavior…

Suddenly he perked up, straightening so fast that she couldn't not notice. "What day is today?"

"Uhm, the 15th?"

He grunted, "No! Not the date. The _day_?"

"Oh! Uh, I think it's Friday?"

A vicious giggle erupted from her boss.

"I know _just_ the thing that you can do for me, Missy…" He gave her an evil grin, a clear remnant of his villainous past that no amount of real-estate confiscation could get rid of.

She gulped.

\-----------------------------

"What is that, that freaky thing~?" Doctor D sang somberly, his voice a deep baritone that was strange to hear from him. Not the kind of voice you'd expect considering his normally bombastic voice. It was at odds with the song, but at least he seemed to be enjoying himself. He continued haltingly, "Hey... wait... I can't hear the girls siiiiiing~"

This was… Kinda boring. The bad doctor was hogging the microphone for most of the night. Most of the other patrons didn't seem to care, but Tara sure did! When would she get to go up and sing a Britina song?

"What is that freeeaaaky thiiiiiing~?" he finished, letting the background singers finish up the song. The crowd erupted into cheers! ...well, as erupt-y as a group of a dozen could be.

Doctor D walked through the crowd of tables to his seat, high-fiving several people on the way back. Before Tara could stand, someone from a front table, a guy wearing one of those weird dome hats on his head that looked like it was covering a bald spot, got up to go to the stage.

Maaaaaan!

"Wasn't that great?" her boss gushed, stars in his eyes as he leaned back in his chair with a familiarity that she'd never seen from him before.

"It was… Something," Tara said with a shrug.

He pouted, "Hmph! You're as big of a drag on this as Shego was!" No sign of sadness, just frustration. A step in the right direction!

"I haven't gotten a chance to sing!" she explained. "I bet I'd be having more fun if I could."

Drew gawked, then let out a strange laugh. It was a mix of nervous and surprised. "I didn't realize that you'd actually _want_ to sing!" He cleared his throat. "Normally, ah, Shego would just… Sit there."

"Well, I'm not Shego," Tara pouted. Why did he keep comparing her to Shego? Someday she'd actually ask him. But not when the wounds were so fresh. "I wanna sing a song too!"

His face brightened. "Yes, you certainly aren't Shego!" He leaned towards her, conspiratorially whispering, "Don't worry. Mr Katz doesn't know half the words, so he tends to cut his songs in half."

Now that he mentioned it, it sounded like the man on the stage was muttering a good chunk of the lines in his O-Boys song… Even saying "something something, hello hello~", which was practically the _opposite_ of knowing the words.

"Be ready!" he ushered her to scoot to the edge of her seat. Which she did! She wasn't going to miss out on the opportunity to sing this time!

"Hello~" That really was short! Mr Katz replaced the microphone in its spot and began leaving the stage.

"Now!" Doctor D cried, excited.

And away she went!

She jumped up from her seat and made her way towards the platform. It looked like a woman in a ponytail at the table next to them had planned on getting up. She was halfway out of her seat when the blonde had noticed her. Tara had beaten her to it, though! The woman shot her a dirty look before plopping back into her seat, putting her head on her arms and sighing. Tara couldn't blame her, though; she hadn't had a chance to sing either.

Stopping for a few seconds to tell the DJ person in charge of setting the songs up which song she wanted, Tara skipped her way up onto the stage and over to the microphone. It was a little too tall for her, so she adjusted it to be her height. It was a moot effort as she removed the microphone from its stand, but she felt it was still worth it.

She looked out to the crowd, picking out her boss in the sea of tables. He was staring at her like she was the best thing since butter. He waved at her and made an 'ok' symbol with his fingers, then gave a thumbs-up and began rocking back and forth in his seat from excitement.

Seeing him so goofily happy at something as simple as her getting up to sing a song… Even if it was pretty boring and it was against her will, she was still glad she came.

\-----------------------------

_Once upon a time_

No.

_It was a dark and stormy ni_

No it wasn't.

_It was the best of times_

Again, it wasn't.

_Someday she would_

Noooooo!

Tara groaned as she scratched out yet another line in her notebook. Curses!

She'd had writer's block for the last week or was some kind of blockage in her mind that kept her from writing out even the simplest of stories!

Focus, T! Spill your heart onto the page!

"HEY! What did I tell you about writing that rubbish while you're working?" The doctor looked up from examining Bob, a snarl of frustration on his face.

So desperate was she to try and fix it that she even tried breaking it down at work. She sighed, "It's okay, Doctor D. I'm not actually writing anything."

He gave her the evil eye. "It certainly looks like you're trying to."

"I KNOW!" She flopped her head onto the table dramatically, beginning to sob. Just a little.

"Hmph! If you have time to cry, you have time to work."

No sympathy for her situation! Such a jerk!

"I already finished," she protested, waving to the pile of research articles. "Nothing matched up to what you're looking for."

"Nnnnngh…" Doctor D ground his teeth and stated, "You could have said something _earlier_ , Missy! Instead of wasting your time doing that, you could've been helping me take care of these… Ah…" Looking around at the plants, he struggled to find the collective word for them. These plants? These guys? Apparently giving up, he just generally waved at the flowers around him and said, "These these!"

"Really?!" Tara gasped. He'd _never_ let her near the plants before! The only interactions she'd had with them was when she was showing Doctor Harris them and the few times that he left her to feed them.

"Yes, really." He looked at her with stars in her eyes and said, "You don't have to be so _eager_!"

"Yes I do!" She hopped up from the table and skipped over to him. Squeeing hard, she cheered, "I finally get to help with the super big project!"

"You were helping out before," he pointed out. "This is just more hands-on."

"But it's the _first time_ I get to be handsy with the plants!" She smiled a biiiiiig wide smile of awesome. "Now you can teach me how to-.."

"Don't be getting any ideas." Ohhhh, scary voice. "These are _my_ creations. They're _mine_. I'm not 'teaching' anyone anything about them! I'm not about to give that balding little dictator what he wants! Not even if it's just you!"

Tara deflated. "Awwww…"

Bob patted her on the shoulder and nodded in comfort.

"I'll explain enough for you to help with this particular task, but nothing more. Both of you stop the dramatics and get over here!"

"Okay big boss guy!" The blonde saluted and went over to stand by him. Bob curled himself back up in the flower bed alongside his plant siblings, waiting for the bad doctor to do his work.

Now that she was closer to the table, she got to look more closely at the various tools strewn across the desk: microscopes, both dissecting and optical, and a third one that didn't look familiar; calipers of several sizes; markers, pens, pencils; a couple of scientific calculators; a really scribbly notebook; a couple of chalkboards that were covered in the incomprehensible chicken scratch that was her boss' handwriting; and a variety of other pieces of equipment that Tara didn't recognize.

"Now then…" He motioned for her to take a look in the optical microscope, taking a step back to make room. She blinked for a moment, then took a step over and looked through the scope.

In it, she could see a collection of plant cells. Oh! This must be from a clipping from Bob!

"As you can see, the structure of their leaves is different from _normal_ plants." Looking closely, she _could_ tell that something was… Off with them?

"Yeah, they look kinda funny at the bottoms…"

"The stoma are constructed differently; instead of being dependent on water to open and close the opening, they rely on an oxygen/carbon monoxide blend that triggers it to open in the presence of carbon dioxide. It's a far faster and efficient method of opening and closing the stoma. This helps to keep the moisture in better. It _also_ -.." she looked up, and he was posed with a finger in the air like he was giving a big epic speech "..-makes it far easier for it to hold its temperature, and keep its insides from poofing out into space.

"So what I need you to do is measure the thickness of the leaves, calculate the density of the lower epidermis, and use that to determine the gas exchange potential of the stoma to see if it can hold itself against the air pressure - or lack thereof - on the moon."

Tara just… Stared. Huh? "What?"

He growled. "I need you to _measure-.._ " a caliper appeared in his hand; magic! "..-the thickness of the leaves-.." he forcibly grabbed one of Bob's leaves and made like he was squishing it between the jaws of the tool "..-and _calculate_ -.." he picked up a nearby calculator and waved it around "..-the density of the epidermis - that's the layer just below the _cuticle_ \- and use it to determine the gas exchange potential of the stoma…"

He was just saying nonsense! There was no way any of what he said was as closely related as he was saying, or related at all. It made as much sense as… As an ohm compensator!

If her professors had heard the word salad he was spewing out, they would've laughed him away as some kind of wannabe scientist. Using big five dollar words like that… It was so, _so_ weird...

"Well?" He tilted an eyebrow at her. "What are you waiting for?"

"I have no idea how you're doing that!" she said honestly. "I don't even understand what you're talking about. How can I help with something I don't understand?" She screwed her eyebrows together briefly, "I mean, I don't even know which cuticle or epidermis you want me to measure! And that other stuff doesn't make sense to me, for how to actually calculate it..."

Doctor D gaped for a moment. Then, amused, he smirked and said, "Oh, so this is something so far out of your reach you can't even help?"

"Well, I mean, uhm…" Her eyes went wiggly as she admitted, "Yeah…"

"HA!" He giggled like a madman. "Haha! Got one over on you!"

Tara pouted, "You've said before that _you're_ the doctor and _I'm_ the assistant…"

"But this is _so far above you_ that you can't even do a _basic_ measurement for me!" he crowed. "I've never had that happen before!"

"Of course you haven't!" she cried, exasperated. "I'm the first person who's worked with you on this stuff!"

"So…" He had a wickedly amused grin on his face, though there was a trace of nervousness. "...so, do you think that it'd be above the heads of other people?"

The blonde thought about it for a moment. "Probably. I know _my_ professors would have trouble with it."

A giiiiiiant smile popped up on his face. Doctor D pumped his fist and shouted, "Yes!" so loud that it echoed loudly through the room. His head popped up as if he just suddenly had a thought. Excited, he pointed to the weird kind-of microscope and asked, "Do you know what that is?!"

"A microscope?" she guessed since it looked like the optical microscope, but more techy.

"It's my own _personal_ scanning electron microscope," he said with a giggle.

She gaped. "Impossible!" Her eyes locked onto the small machine as she uttered, "I saw my professor's scanning electron microscope… It's super big!"

The blue man began giggling uncontrollably. He whooped, "I could just boggle the minds of your simpleton teachers just by showing them one of my basic pieces of equipment?"

"Yup!" She looked up at him. "Can I have one?"

"Nope!" His giggling got louder even as she pouted at his nonchalant shooting down of her request.

"You're so mean!"

"Yes, yes I am!" His giggling suddenly erupted into full-blown mad scientist laughter, his hands stiffening into claws as he threw his head back. This apparently riled his plants up as they curled up and around him in wild spirals.

10/10 this time! Been a while since she heard him laugh that hard.

"So then, what _can_ I help with?" She decided to get things back on track since he was being such a meany. It wasn't funny to her anymore.

Doctor D froze, as did the flowers. "I, uh…" After a few moments of thinking, he shrugged. "I have no idea." The flowers shrugged too before curling back into their flower beds. "What did you want to do?"

"What do I… Want to do…?" She boggled. "What do I want to do?" Suddenly all of the ideas that she'd put on the backburner flopped themselves out of her mental closet. Brightly, she cheered, "I have a million bajillion ideas for what I can do!"

"Hm…" He pondered for a second. "...you know what? Go ahead and blather your silly simple ideas at me." The calipers he'd been holding found their way around another of Bob's leaves. "I'm sure _one_ of them is probably not completely terrible."

"Yay!" She posed with a fist in the air. Excellent! She thought hard on which idea would appeal to him best, then began her pitch. "So I was thinking about the security of the lab..."


	9. Chapter 9

"..-and that's how we can secure the lab better!" Tara finished her spiel to her boss, leaning back off the workbench he had all of his equipment on. She took a deeeeep breath and sighed it out. Man, monologuing really took it out of you!

"Do you think we can get that sort of thing past the brain trust?" Doctor D asked as he shooed one of the daffodils away from the scribbly-scrabbly notebook he was writing in.

"I dunno. We could run it by James, see what he thinks?"

"Bah!" He made a spitting motion. "Like I need that overblown chump to help out with anything."

"Oh." An awkward silence fell upon them.

This _always_ happened whenever James was brought up. Tara didn't know exactly what had happened between the two men beyond Kim being James' daughter. Doctor D had gone on a mini-rant about i oncet, mentioning robots named 'Bebe', but he'd cut himself off partway through when he was describing the utter revenge he would have wreaked upon the men if Kim hadn't been there for some reason. It was probably something embarrassing. He tended to do that with most of his embarrassing stuff.

The silence was _unbearable_ after a few minutes. She was so used to him talking at this point that the quiet was barely tolerable for even _one_ minute, let alone several!

How could she break it?

...should she ask about Shego? It had been a few days since she was last mentioned. Bonnie's party was tomorrow, so she didn't wanna upset him then. Well, everything was already really awkward...

"Heya, Doctor D?"

He jumped. Apparently he'd forgotten she was there. He did that sometimes. " _What_?!"

"I, ah, was wondering if you could tell me about Shego? About what you guys did and stuff when you were all villain-y?" She'd been curious for a while now - ever since she was hired under him, really - about what his villain life had been like. There hadn't been an easy segway to ask. Until she just thought about Shego's role in his life! Two birds, one stone!

"Oh really?" The curious tone confused her. Why would he be curious about her being curious?

"Yeah," she confirmed.

"Well…" He put down the tool he'd been using and seemed to think hard on her question. "Shego was my sidekick. She did the dirty work while I did the smart guy stuff. She was the brawn, I was the brain."

"What did you guys do when you _weren't_ being bad?"

"What? Like our hobbies?" Tara nodded. Drew hummed, "Well, I mostly just worked on my schemes…"

"Karaoke? Bowling?"

" _Villainous bonding_ ," he insisted ineffectually.

"Then why do you still wanna do them?" She had him there!

"I… Erm… Nnnngh…" He sputtered and spat, "Next question!"

No fair! She decided not to press it in case he decided to stop his hobby things out of misplaced vengeance and asked, "And Shego?"

"She liked to take her frustrations out on me whenever things went wrong, which happened a _lot_." He made an explosion noise. "She also really likes to sunbathe, and mock me. Lots of mocking me." Straightening up, Doctor D said as if just realized it, "In fact, I think that was probably her _favorite_ hobby… Hmph!" He bent back down, this time to look at his notebook. "And she loved to not listen to me."

"So, she was your sidekick that stole stuff, fought Kim, made fun of you and hurt you a bunch, and never listened to you?"

"Yes…?" He snorted as he noted, "When you say it like _that_ it sounds pretty nasty!"

"She was hurting you, yeah?" He nodded as if it was obvious. "And you were her boss?" Another nod. "So why didn't you fire her?"

"I needed her to fend off Kim Possible," Doctor D answered.

"She never won!"

"She was very skilled at infiltration and stealing stuff," he muttered defensively.

"But you just said that you hired her to take on Kim!"

"She got me money and the items I needed for my schemes," he pointed out. "She _also_ stuck around, even after the mess with Hank and the henchmen! She wasn't exactly some kind of appendix to my operation."

"But she was mean and hurt you and stuff!" she bother-bothered, ignoring the story that was begging to be told about the Hank guy. "And I'm sure there're other people you could've hired that could've helped and _not_ hurt you."

"I also like-liked her, okay?" he shouted, frustrated. "Is that too hard to understand?"

"No, well... Yeah, kinda?" Tara seemed as confused as Doctor D looked at her protest, so she continued with determination, "I mean, she was mean! Why would you like her? What nice stuff is there about her at all?"

"Well," Doctor D started, pausing to frown in thought before snapping his fingers and raising his fingers with air quotes, "Well, what 'nice stuff' is there about your Bonnie friend?"

_That_ caught her off guard.

"You remembered her name?"

"Focus, Missy!" her boss said. "I asked you what's so great about your friend? You know, the one you're trying to _impress_ with this whole party mess we'll be going to tomorrow?"

"I, ah…" Tara felt a bit stuck. "I mean, she's cool, and strong…"

"So's Shego," he said flatly.

"Bonnie's also super nice to her friends," she pouted slightly. Counting off, Tara said, "She really loves Junior, like a lot, she's a big team player… And we've been BFFs since _forever_."

"Shego is honest and certainly never holds her tongue," Drew said with a trace of bitterness.

"Is she _honest_ or is she _blunt_?" the blonde asked, knowing the answer. She knew it because Bonnie had the same problem...

"Blunt," the blue man ground out angrily. It was pretty obvious he was getting upset now. Oops!

"So… Uh…" Change the topic! "Uhm… How 'bout them Mad Dogs…?"

"I don't care about some silly little teeny-bop high school junk," Doctor D rebuffed, his tone still upset. He growled, "What I _do_ care about is trying to figure out what it is about Shego that has me… Nnnnngh…" His hands brushed rapidly through his fauxhawk. "What _is_ it about her that I love so much?!"

"Uh… She's dark and mysterious…?" Tara wasn't really sure what to say. His voice… It sounded all shaky and stuff. Apparently this was really bothering him...

" _What about her_ drives me so… So _insane_?!" He looked to Tara for an explanation. All she could do was shrug. He snarled, "Big help you are!"

His vines began to flail, clearly agitated at their creator's angst. In their flailings, one managed to reach out far enough to grab the empty shell of the robot that had been sitting there for forever and smash part of the front panel.

Uh-oh.

"She's always so mean to me! Always! Barely had anything nice to say to me."

"She did say something nice about you at some point though, didn't she?" Tara pointed out. "She isn't _always_ mean to you. Otherwise why would you like her so much?"

_That_ was the wrong thing to say. His vines just flailed even _harder_ , now reaching super high at the ceiling and around the room. Somehow, though, they kept _just_ missing Tara and his research tools, like they were intentionally making an effort not to hurt her or their father's work.

"What do you _think_ I'm _trying to do right now_ , Missy? Contemplate my navel?! Don't you think I realize that is the _stupidest thing I've ever heard_!?" he spat.

"Uhm…" The blonde thought hard on what _else_ that she could think of for why he liked her... "She was your voice of reason, wasn't she?"

Her boss nodded fiercely, like an angry, overly eager child, then corrected, "More in a _soul-crushing_ way. But…" He grunted hard. "She did _try_. And… And Kim Possible isn't smarter than her," Doctor D added unhelpfully.

"Right…" Tara reached hard for another good descriptor. What else had she heard from other people on Shego? What good qualities did Bonnie have? It seemed like the two women were similar. "Uhm… She's confident… Self-assured… Determined…"

"Always thinks she's right."

"And she is sometimes!" Tara interrupted his bitter parade. It was generic, but he gave a grunt of affirmation.

"The most gorgeous woman I've ever seen," he breathed, eyes unfocused for a moment. Tara found that hard to believe… How could anyone be more beautiful than Vivian, or Bonnie's sister? Or Bonnie herself?

"She's assertive, and strong…" You could _see_ him deflating. The vines calmed down as well withdrawing back into the flowerbed. It still mystified Tara how the plant matter could appear and disappear at will like that. Oh well.

"Her power is _fascinating_ , if ouchy. And, I guess, once you get past the anger and stuff, she was pretty level-headed…" Now _that_ Tara severely doubted. "Her snark is also _frustrating_ …" He groaned as he muttered, "And I miss it _terribly_ …"

"So, those are things that you find attractive?" Tara asked.

"I… Hm… Nnnngh..."

"That's a yes." She gave him a smug smile even as he sneered. "So you have your type! And now you know why she drove you so crazy! 'cause she ticked off all the boxes that you like in a person!" Tara cheered, "You can totes find someone else."

"Someone else?" He gaped. " _Someone else_?"

"Well, yeah!" Tara said, "I mean, you can't pine for Shego _forever_ , can you?"

"You wanna _bet_?" Doctor D snarled. She'd gotten a feel for him over the weeks, though, and knew, _knew_ that there was a layer of bemusement, like the idea hadn't even occurred to him before.

Apparently it gave him something to think on super hard, as he had an air of pensivity to him now.

This time the silence was calmer and more welcome.

\--------------------------------------------

"You're going to a _party_?" Vivian gaped at the blue man, looking up from the chart that she was drawing up of the innards of the Lorwardian walker.

"You don't have to sound so surprised," Drew grumbled as he continued trying to aim a giant huge incredibly big wire stripper at the ohm compensator. His plants were having trouble, though, wiggly about unevenly. "Just because I'm not 'hip' doesn't mean I'm _dead_."

"And Bonnie specifically asked for him!" Tara explained in a conspiratorial whisper, "She wanted an intellectual type at the party thing."

"Oh really?" The skepticism in Vivian's voice was painfully obvious. The assistant chose to ignore it.

"Yup. Bonnie came up with it after I said that I work at the space center. I think she was impressed!"

"Uh-huh." The svelte blonde set down her pencil and said sternly, "Doesn't that seem a little odd to you?"

"Huh?"

"She suddenly wanted you and your boss to show up after hearing you worked at the space center?"

"Yes…?" Tara didn't understand what was so weird about it.

"Your 'friend' is hanging out in the wrong circles," Vivian said pointedly. "I don't think you'll want to go."

"Bonnie's my friend," the assistant insisted. "She wouldn't have invited me if she didn't think we'd fit in."

"Nnnngh… Now _I'm_ starting to wonder if I should go," Doctor D said, pausing again in trying to aim the stripper. "If your friend is really going to be the type to try and make us 'fit in'..."

"You hafta go! You already claimed your favor from me," Tara pointed out.

"Nnnngh… Argh… I, hrm…" He sputtered before relenting, "Fine! I guess I'll still go to your stupid party."

"Yay!" Victory!

"I can't stop you from going," Vivian started, a stern tone to her voice. "But I _can_ tell you that it's a ferociously bad idea."

"It'll be _fine_ ," Tara assured her. "Bonnie's my BFF. She won't let anything happen!"

The other blonde woman shrugged. "If you say so." Changing gears, she asked, "So, how're you guys going to get to a private island in the middle of nowhere, and what are you planning on wearing?"

Drat! Tara forgot about the island part. How _would_ she get there?

"I have my hovercar," Drew said snippily. "How do you think I manage to get to my own island?"

"Super secret transport tubes?" Tara had thought that was how he did it, anyway. She'd stumbled upon one when she'd gone to the bathroom last week and figured that's how people transported themselves around here.

Doctor D laughed. "Do you have _any idea_ how impractical that would be?"

"But what about the tubes arou-.."

"And what are you going to wear?" Doctor Porter asked, cutting Tara off. That wasn't very nice!

"My bright blue cowboy tux, of course!" he said brightly, as if it was the most brilliant thing in the world.

Tara and Vivian shared a look.

"Uhm, maybe you should wear slacks? Or a nice black tux?" Tara suggested gently.

"Eh?" He tried to snip at the wire and missed. Looking over to them, he asked, "What for?"

"Because you'll look _ridiculous_ in bright blue," Vivian said bluntly.

"Bah! What do you two know?" Doctor Lipsky waved his hands dismissively.

"More than you," the older woman grunted, clearly offended.

Even Doctor D caught that. "I, uhm, nnnngh… Fine! Ruin my fun! I won't go in my favorite dress-up outfit!" His vines tossed down the wire stripper in apparent anger, the tool falling to the ground with a loud clang. "So what should I go in?"

"I think your regular outfit should be fine. It's not basic average clothing, and it's easy," Vivian said with a shrug.

"But, but Bonnie said not to dress casual!"

"Just because it's Drew's casual doesn't mean that it's _everyone's_ casual," the other woman pointed out. "And she also said not to dress too fancy from what you told us, too."

"I still think a tux or slacks would work better," Tara muttered grumpily.

"Really, it's up to whatever Drew's comfortable with," Vivian said, looking to the puffing blue man.

"Oh, so _now_ it's what I'm comfortable in?" He pouted, "Maybe I'm only comfortable in my bright blue tux!"

"Then go naked or something!" Vivian threw her hands up in the air, obviously done with the conversation. "Just don't go in that."

"Hmph!" The bad doctor picked his tool back up. "I'll think about it…"

Things began settling down again. But it left Tara with one very important question. "Uhm… Doctor D?"

"WHAT?!" The blue man glared over at her. Wow! Apparently he was done with the conversation too!

"Can I hitch a ride with you…?"

\--------------------------------------

Sexy bright red lipstick?

Check!

Dark blue eyeshadow to compliment her bright blue eyes?

Check!

Her voluminous blonde hair put up in a swoopy sleek side-swept ponytail?

Check!

Super cute yellow shimmery flattering scoop-backed evening dress that was probably overdoing it but looked too good to pass up?

Check!

She looked at the overall picture of herself in the full-sized mirror that hung on her closet door. Looking back was a super cute blonde that looked put together for a spankin' time!

It was time to get the party started~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short but important chapter. I had to get help from people for extolling Shego's virtues, as sad as it sounds. I don't get the Shego hype.


	10. Chapter 10

Tara gaped over the edge of the hovercraft. Wow! They were super high up!

At the moment, they were flying at a super high speed over the Atlantic Ocean. It was crazy! She’d never experienced anything like it! Doctor D could’ve made a _fortune_ giving rides at amusement parks! Or oh! Maybe selling it to a car company and revolutionizing the transportation industry!

 ...nah. There’s no way he wouldn’t have already thought of that. Probably scoffed at him or something when he tried.

 “Almost there,” her boss grunted beside her. He’d opted to go with his basic ol’ outfit ‘because it’s more science-y’. It made Tara feel weird; she was majorly overdressed compared to him.

Looking ahead, Tara could see the island that Bonnie’s father-in-law lived on. It was actually pretty big for a private island! The house - mansion, really - took up most of the island, though, save for what looked like a large veranda on the side. Instead of a garden or anything fancy like that, the ground in front of it was disturbed and turned up, leaving it a dirty rough mess with pieces of machinery and metal sticking up in random places.

Weird. Tara hadn’t heard about _that_ being the new craze for lawns. Bonnie must be trying to set a trend. There was no other reason her yard would be like that.

As they closed in, they could see people milling around on the veranda and wandering in and out of the building.

“Nnnngh… There’re so many people… _And so few parking spaces_ ,” he grumbled sharply.

“Yeah!” Tara giggled. “She must be throwing the party of the _year_!”

“You go on ahead. I’ll find a parking spot,” he said grumpily once they got to the front door and set down right outside it. She hopped out with the help of a guy waiting by the entrance. The guy made to go to the other side of the vehicle, but jumped back with surprise as it floated back up and out towards the sea of tightly-clumped hover cars.

Happily, she skipped over to the front door where a bouncer was standing with a list.

“Name?” The gruff guy at the front doors asked, his cute little fez flopping as he looked down.

“I’m Tara! Tara Blie!”

“Terribly?” He looked mystified.

“ _No_! Bleye!” She waved behind her where the doctor had flown off as the guy seemed to mark off her name on the list. “The blue guy in the lab coat is my plus one.”

“Drakken?” His eyebrows rose in surprise.

“Nono, _Doctor Lipsky_ ,” she insisted. He must’ve known her boss from the news. “He’s not a villain guy anymore!” Proudly, she noted, “He’s my boss.”

“Doctor Dra-.. Er, _Lipsky_ , was invited to this party? And you’re his _new assistant_?”

“Yes…?” What was so bad about that? He was saying it like it was a bad thing!

“Oh boy…” He rubbed his head like he was getting a headache. “I’ll put the guards on standby…”

“Oooookay…?” Tara shrugged. “Can I go in?”

“...yes.” He stepped aside.

Once she was in, she was nearly overwhelmed. Wow! The entrance led straight to a large room. Against two of the walls were tables set up with a variety of food. The scents enticed Tara in a way that she couldn’t remember having ever been in the past: hor d'oeuvres of cucumber, garlic, and fine herbal cheese with smoked salmon & capers on top; fancy-looking lasagna with expensive-looking cheese sprinkled on top (another odd choice on Bonnie’s part); a tower of angel food cake and tiramisu; and, at the end of the second table, a whoooole bunch of fancy etched glasses, many filled with differently colored liquids. Knowing Bonnie, at least _some_ of them would’ve been some really good sparkling grape juice.

Where _was_ Bonnie? Before she should dive into the food she should greet the host!

As she looked around for her friend, snippets of conversation danced in her ears.

“..-never lasagna! How _dare_ you!?” A one-eyed man with a mechanical hand was shouting at the poor man serving foodstuffs at a table at the front of the room. “I don’t care if it’s _gourmet_! NEVER! SERVE! ME! LASAGNA!”

“..-nating my time has been superb!” a blue woman with wires for hair was cheerily telling a rather large woman with a big gap in her front teeth. “The children are so _precious_ …”

The not-fat-because-fat-was-rude woman tsked, “Oh deary, you need to get some help for the reverse polariz-..”

“..-exit is just behind the refreshments,” the old guy that Tara was pretty sure was Bonnie’s father-in-law was assuring a man with a giant helmet on his head that was covering all but his mouth. He looked like a costumed character from a comic or something!

...now that Tara looked around, there were a _lot_ of people that looked like they came straight from a comic book.

Suddenly one of them jumped right in her way. He was a strange-looking man, with a large beaky nose, a faux-hawk like her boss, a weird mask, strange costume boots, and wearing a leotard with a feathery cape thrown over top.

“Did the fall hurt?” he asked her, combing a hand through his hair.

“Huh?” Tara stared. “I didn’t fall.”

“When you fell from heaven,” the man supplied.

“I didn’t come from heaven. I came through the front door.”

He looked a little confused before shaking his head and creepily smiling as he said, “Don’t tell me if you want me to take you out for dinner. Just smile for yes, or do a backflip for no.”

“Uh?” She frowned. Dinner? Why have dinner when everything was already supplied for the party? The blonde wasn’t even close to wanting to leave. It’d be hard, but…

She took a breath, then summoned all of her cheerleading prowess and did a backflip that didn’t even displace her from her spot. The form was a little sloppy, but there just wasn’t enough space to straighten it out!

The crowd around her noticed for a second, with a couple of them laughing and a few clapping in appreciation.

The man in front of her, however, snarled. “So, you think you’re too good for me?”

“Too good?” What?

“You think that I, Aviarius, isn’t good enough for the likes of _you_?!”

“Back off, birdbrain.”

Tara looked behind her to her right. Standing next to her now like a ghost was Bonnie!

Her friend said warningly, settling an arm on Tara’s shoulder to which the blonde squeed internally. “She’s not interested, if you couldn’t tell. Like, go get lost or something. You should feel lucky I even invited you. Like, you’re only here because Papi loved your work with the Go glow theft.”

“I will REMEMBER this!” he cried dramatically before flipping his cape around him and disappearing into the crowd.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bonnie said dismissively, waving her hand like the threat was nothing. Tara just about hugged her friend, but was stopped when she noticed what the tanned woman was wearing.

Bonnie was dressed a little weird too! She had on a knee-length shoulderless plum dress with a slit in the side up to her hip, with a loose chain belt around her waist and a nice silver spiky crown settled on her head. Was this secretly a costume party? Why didn’t Bonnie tell her that?!

The tan woman scowled. “Like, I _told_ you not to overdo it,” she chastised in greeting. She read her mind just like James! Was she developing psychic powers too? Or was Tara projecting her thoughts? “Do you see anyone else dressed up like you?”

“No…” Tara pouted. “But I wanted to look super good for your party.”

Her friend sighed patiently. “T, you need to learn the art of subtlety.”

The blonde flopped a little. “Maaaaan…”

“So…” Bonnie looked around the room in a bit of a show. “Where’s your boss guy?”

“Doctor Lipsky?” She wouldn’t have known who Doctor D was, so Lipsky it is! “Last I saw him, he was parking his hovercar thing.”

“Hovercar?” Bonnie tilted an eyebrow. “Did he know we have a chauffeur? You did tell him, right?”

Uh-oh. “Uh, no? You didn’t mention anything…”

Bonnie shook her head sadly. “T, ever since J and I got hitched, I’ve been living the _finer_ life. Like, you should’ve _expected_ there to be a chauffeur.”

“I’m sorry…” Tara already felt like she was wrecking the party.

Surprisingly, her friend smiled. “Don’t worry too much about it. I’ve seen worse just tonight!” She scowled and noted, “We already had to deal with these people called ‘the Underminers’ trying to crash the party. Drilled straight through the garden!” A hand waved out the window to the veranda outside. “We tossed them out, machine and all!”

Oh! So _that’s_ why all the dirt was everywhere! They must have really good security to stop a villain attack like that! The guy up front must’ve just been nervous.

“Party crashers suck,” Tara said. “Remember that time when Ron Reger tri-..”

“ _Please_ T, don’t bother me with lame stories from high school,” Bonnie said with a fake yawn. It was easy to tell her fake yawns from her real yawns; she closed her eyes when she fake yawned.

That had only been two months ago… Tara didn’t understand, but complied. Changing the topic, she asked, “So, B, whatcha been up to?”

“Oh, this and that.” Bonnie sipped from a glass she’d been holding that was full of a rich brown liquid. Strange; that didn’t look like sparkling grape juice… Raising an eyebrow, she asked, “So, T, what have _you_ been up to in that space center of yours? Cracked any Lorwardian tech?”

“Well, since you mention it…” Tara bounced in her spot, super excited to be able to talk about her science stuff with Bonnie at last! “We’ve managed to mostly deconstruct a Lorwardian quadropod.”

_That_ set Bonnie’s eyebrows into orbit. “ _Really_?” she asked in a very not-Bonnie way. She was loud enough to draw the attention of a couple of nearby discussion groups.

“Really really!” the blonde chirped. “We’re working on making a physical _and_ electrical mapping of the interior of the mech. We’re _soooooo_ close to finishing that it almost hurts! Me, Doctor Lipsky, and Doctor Vivian Francis Porter - of _course_ you know her, who doesn’t? - have been combining our efforts to really understand the technology involved.”

“Oh?” The guy with the giant helmet butted into their conversation. “Und ze teknology, hyu haff it cracked, ya?”

“Well, not yet…” Tara supplied helpfully, “But we’ve got the groundwork set up! We’re hoping that we can use the electrical mapping to find more efficient means to-..”

“Back off, Chromedome,” Bonnie sneered. “This is _my_ intel.”

Huh? Intel?

“A gracious host would share vith her guests, would she NOT?” he replied with a weird cadence, a smarmy smile on his face.

Tara’s friend gripped her glass with the strength of a thousand divas. Tara was surprised it didn’t break! “And a good _guest_ would know when not to push their luck… Unless they don’t want to be there anymore.”

“If you’re wondering about our project, Doctor Lipsky’s going to be here soon.” Bonnie glared at Tara. She didn’t understand why.

“Oh really?” The curious edge in his voice increased tenfold. “Und dis Doctor Lipsky, he is…?”

“My boss! I’m his assistant.”

“How interestink,” the helmet guy murmured. “Truly, a WONDERFUL HOST to wrangle ze most interestink guests…”

“So you can hightail it over to the _other_ ‘interestink guest’ and leave us to ourselves,” Bonnie said with narrowed eyes. “Like, he went to park his car so he’ll be here any minute.”

“Zis Doctor Lipsky… Vat does he look like?”

Tara thought hard. What would be a good description of her boss? “Uhm, he likes wearing blue… His lab coat which he wore because it’s more science-y is all blue, with black gloves and boots. He has a really small ponytail, and a really big floofy mohawk thing…”

“Und he is blue.” The statement was flat, disbelieving.

“Oh!” Duh! “Yeah, he is!”

The man with the helmet slapped his head. “Und ze UNIVERSE laughs at me…”

“You’re talking about Doctor Drakken.” Bonnie’s voice was _also_ flat.

“What’s so weird about Doctor Lipsky?” Tara asked, pouting.

“Zo hiz name beink ‘Lipsky’, it is mocking GOLD!” He laughed at it.

“That’s pretty mean,” the blonde said.

“I am a MEAN MAN!”

“Oh, shut up Dementor! No one cares about what you have to say.”

“Doctor D!” Tara turned to see her boss walking up. For some reason, people were parting way and whispering.

“Und she calls you ‘Doctor D’ too?” the man apparently called Dementor - and _he’s_ making fun of Doctor Lipsky for _his_ name? - clicked his tongue. “I vould tink zat you vould like to make a hasty retreat, ya?”

"Cram it!"

The wire-haired woman was following closely behind her boss. "Doktor, ze conversation ve vere haffing on ze variability of ohm’s law-..”

Doctor D turned to Tara and spat, ignoring the scientastic woman, "Vivian was right! This party's nothing but bad all-around."

“Hey! My parties are _never_ bad,” Bonnie interjected, offended.

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Tara said, now understanding. This wasn’t a costume party, not the way she was thinking. With a name like ‘Dementor’ and the way everyone was dressed and acting... “B, I think you’re right. I don’t think I fit in with your new crowd…”

“I am tinking zat same thing,” the woman murmured. “Und here I vas excited to share my good fortunes vith comrades…”

“Don’t leave!” Bonnie said, grabbing Tara’s arm. She almost desperately added, “Like, you _just_ got here. Just because you came with a lame-o doesn’t mean you should leave.”

“He’s my ride,” the assistant pointed out defensively.

“I’ll drop you off!” Now Bonnie was pleading with her. Since when did Bonnie plead like that?

What was going on?

“I, ah…” Now she was feeling torn. Her friend clearly really wanted her to stay… But these people were bad bad news. And the comment about intel earlier… Was Tara just invited to be pumped for info? Why did people wanna know about the Lorwardian project?

“She _already said_ she was _leaving_ ,” her boss snipped, grabbing her other arm.

“She’s an adult. She doesn’t need some, some _failed villain_ with an ego problem to tell her what to do!” Bonnie pulled her arm a little, trying to pull her closer.

“She doesn’t need some _drama queen_ telling her what to do either!” He pulled harder, dragging Tara closer to him.

“She’s _my friend_!” Bonnie pulled on Tara’s arm to no avail. Apparently Doctor D was a little too strong for her. “You can’t have her!”

“Bonnie…” Tara wasn’t sure _who_ she thought was right. They both had points.

...what did _she_ want to do?

Before she could make a decision, her boss’ head snapped to attention. Doctor Lipsky tensed as he looked behind Tara, then scowled. Tara tilted her head in confusion… Until she heard a voice behind her...

“Hello, _doc_ …”


	11. Chapter 11

Tara turned around to see who had called her boss ‘doc’.

Green and black evening dress in a weird harlequin pattern with matching high-heel boots? Green skin? Long, luxurious black hair? Deep green eyes?

Oh boy...

“Hello _Shego_ ,” Doctor D replied icily. He let go of Tara’s arm and stared her down. “If I’d known you’d’ve been here, I wouldn’t have come!”

“Funny.” The green woman examined her nails. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

“Hmph!” The doctor crossed his arms. “You’re just some mercenary with a snarky mouth!” he spat.

“At least I’m not some two-bit goody-goody,” Shego snarled in return. At that point, both the Dementor guy and the wire-haired woman stepped back into the crowd, worried looks on their faces.

“We should probably head out, Doctor D…” Tara cautioned, looking about the room in concern. The commotion was really starting to attract attention. Not in the good way, either. She could see several people whispering while Bonnie looked on, hands still wrapped around Tara’s arm but a vicious frown on her face.

“Doctor D?” Shego looked flabbergasted for a moment. Then she cried, angrily, “ _Doctor D_ ?!” She rounded on Tara, her hands shooting sparks. “You let this scrawny little airhead call you _my_ nickname?!”

“Hey! I came up with it independently! Just because it’s the same doesn’t mean I copycatted you!” the blonde defended, staring the other woman down. Yeah, the lady was super scary. But there was no way she would dare get on Bonnie’s bad side by wrecking the party with fighting. At least, Tara hoped not. Her BFF could be super _duper_ scary sometimes!

“Oh please! Why should you care?!” he hissed. “I don’t even get why you’re so upset!” Doctor D said, voice raising, “ _You_ left _me_!”

“You’re such an _idiot_!” Shego turned back to him and yelled right in his face. “If you weren’t such a quitter, I wouldn’t have left!”

“Who’re you calling a quitter? I won a medal for _defending the planet from aliens_ , if you didn’t remember!” he growled, getting in her face in return.

“You _quit_ on me!” The green woman clenched her fists.

“You quit on me first!”

“I’m not talking about the _job_ , I’m talking about _conquering the world_!” She threw her hands up in exasperation.

“Maybe I was tired of trying the same thing over and over!” Drew snarled. “The definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I’m stubborn, but I’m no Sisyphus! The second I won, I took it and ran!”

“Maybe if you _did it right_ we wouldn’t have kept losing!”

“And maybe if you could take Kim Possible in a fight we could’ve actually _won_!” That was apparently a low blow as Tara heard some voices in the crowd gasp. Shego also reacted, teeth baring and flames licking at her fingertips.

“What did you say?” she said in a quiet snarl.

Tara’s boss wavered for a moment, his back starting to hunch over, but he shook his head and stood up straight as he replied, “You couldn’t take Kim Possible on in a fight. It’s not just _my_ fault that we lost.”

“Oh really?” Shego got even _more_ in his face, their noses practically touching.

“Yeah!”

“Oh _REALLY_?!” Her fists were clenching and unclenching, though the flame had died out for some reason.

“YEA-..”

His words were cut out by a sudden fist right in his jaw. He went flying, the crowd parting like  water as he skittered across the ground.

“Doctor D!” Tara cried. She ran over to him, breaking her arm free from Bonnie’s grip, but before she could help him up he waved her off. He hopped to his feet himself, grimace on his face.

“Stay out of this, Missy,” he growled. Ohhh boy. Scary voice. Time to back away.

“Want another one?” Shego flexed her fist. “I’ve got _plenty more_ where _that_ came from.”

“Bah!” The doctor rubbed his face where she’d punched him, then smirked. “When you throw them like _that_ I can take it all day!”

Her expression darkened. “Maybe I was taking it easy considering our history…”

“Or maybe you’re rusty,” Doctor D said, a small quiver in his voice. “When was the last time you did anything but sunbathe on a beach? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while.”

“We should get out of here,” Tara repeated, braving his grump to grab his arm and trying to drag him away.

He didn’t move.

“I gave myself a long vacation after getting rid of your sorry excuse of a person,” Shego defended. She shrugged, “I think it _still_ hasn’t been a long enough vacation…” A sneer overtook her face. “ _Or_ long enough since I’ve seen you!”

“I couldn’t agree more!” His arms crossed over his chest as he nodded in agreement.

For some reason, that made her _even angrier_.

“You two-bit hack! You’re nothing without me,” she snarled.

“Oh really? Well then, I might as well return that medal and give up my cushy research position then, huh?” he fired back.

“Like, could you two take this outside?” Bonnie sniped from the sidelines. Even _she_ didn’t seem to have the nerve to get between them. “You’re wrecking my party.”

“She/He started it!” They both pointed at each other, then both growled in frustration.

“Y’know what? Yeah, I _did_ start the fight. You don’t have the _backbone_ to start one with me,” Shego said, sneering.

“As if you could start a fight that wasn’t against your _precious little Kimmie_ ,” Drew said in a mocking voice.

“I can sure as _hell_ finish one!” she screamed, taking a flying leap at his person. His expression changed to one of panic, his vines suddenly bursting from his clothes and grabbing at the nearest person that wasn’t Tara.

“UND NOW I AM BEING THE GRAPPLED!” the helmeted man yelled as he was dragged into the middle of the fight between the former partners. The vines put him up as a swinging shield between the raging flaming woman and their father.

It was too late for Shego to change course. She collided with Dementor with a solid ‘thunk’, the air escaping from her lungs as the vines tossed the two of them away. They flew into the crowd, knocking several of them down in the process.

“I, ah…” Doctor D stood there, shocked for a moment, before saying, “I, ah, meant to do that?”

With that, a few brave and heroic security staff came out of the woodwork. They surrounded the duo, shock sticks charged and ready.

“ **DRAKKEN**!” The green woman jumped up from the pile of people, fists flaming and a vicious scowl on her face. “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!”

“Help?” he whispered, looking at his vines and the guards who were now surrounding the two. The vines looked between the enraged woman and Drew and shrugged unknowingly. The guards looked at Shego for a moment… Then took one large step back. “Oh… Crud.”

She charged, eyes flashing; he whimpered, shielding his face.

That was _enough_!

Tara did what no one else was daring to do: stepped between the two.

The shock of it seemed to snap the green woman out of it somewhat. She stopped her charge RIGHT in front of the blonde and growled, “MOVE IT, Short Stuff.”

Shego made like she was going to dodge around her. Tara’s instincts from cheerleading, though unused the last few weeks, were still as sharp as ever. She kept up with the feints that Shego threw out like a pro. She was sure Kim would’ve been super proud of her!

“Get. Out. Of. My. Way.”

“What are you _doing_ , Missy?” her boss asked, boggled.

“I’m your _assistant_ ,” Tara said plainly. “I’m _assisting_.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve assisted Doc _plenty_ of times,” Shego said in a weird voice.

“Yeah, of _course_ I have! An assistant helps their boss with whatever they need.” Tara nodded. There were snickers in the audience. She didn’t understand why, nor did she care.

"Well, she may not be as snarky or witty as you, but she does worlds better than you. She LISTENS to me!"

“Thanks?” Tara wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a slam. Probably an attempt at a compliment, knowing her boss.

“Get out of my way,” Shego repeated, taking a swipe at the blonde. It was almost in slow-motion.

She dodged out of the way, ducking as the fist ripped into the space above her head.

The green woman blinked, then frowned. She whipped out a leg kick at the assistant’s feet, faster than the punch.

Tara cartwheeled out of the way, an excitement burbling in her belly. Wow! This was just as much fun as cheerleading practice!

Shego growled, then a spark of recognition flitted through her eyes as she dismissively stated, “Oh right, I remember you... You’re one of those cheer-fu kids, like Cupcake.”

“Cheer-fu?” Tara tilted her head. “I don’t know any ‘fu’. Juuuuust-..” she struck a pose, fist pumped in the air and legs spread wide to emphasize how awesome she was “..-cheerleading!”

“Ugh!” The mercenary rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure kid…”

The blonde harrumphed and complained, “Why do people keep calling me a kid?”

“Because you _are_ ,” Shego said as she stalked over to where Tara stood, still posed. “What do you expect when you do silly _kiddie_ things like pose like that?” She shook her head. “You’re as bad as the doc is!”

“Okay, yeah, maybe I _do_ like doing silly things. And I know I’m kinda airheaded…” Tara crossed her arms now, miffed. “But that doesn’t mean I’m a _kid_.”

“Adults don’t play kid games,” the green woman said, frowning.

“If adults don’t play kid games, then why are you taking it so easy on me?” The blonde giggled as a silly thought occurred to her. “Or are you really that rusty that you can’t hit me?”

Shego’s eyes shot open at that. A whisper tore through the crowd. She looked around, her gaze scanning the crowd like she was just seeing them for the first time.

“Okay then. You don’t want to be treated like a kid?” Shego adjusted her gloves, flames erupting from them in an impressive display as she looked dangerously at Tara. “Then get ready for a _world_ of hurt…”

“Are you sure you want to do thi-..” her boss started. Tara’s raised hand stopped him. Baffled, he whispered loudly, “She’s serious!”

“So am I,” Tara stated with a shrug. She was secretly nervous, but Kim managed to do it on the regular. She could do it too! Speaking of... Titterling then, she said, “As Kim would say, it’s no big!”

“What am I _paying_ you people for?!” she could hear Bonnie hiss behind her.

“Not this!” the guy with the fez said, standing off to the side with her. “We don’t get hazard pay.”

“You want the Kimmie treatment? You _got_ it!”

Shego then took a quick swipe at the blonde, who leapt forward and over the angry woman. She did an extra, large flip with the momentum to get some distance between the two of them.

The green woman cried out as she fired blasts from her hands. Large, shifting, fiery balls of green and black flew at Tara in a line. Dodged left, right, down, then leapt faaaaar up. They were easy enough to dodge; they weren’t going very fast.

This was _super_ fun! No wonder Kim did this sorta thing all the time! It was like the time they took on the Upperton Bobcats, with the flipping and ducking and constant movement. It was easier than she’d expected… Had Kim been slipping in some of her combat training into their routines?

Shego concentrated her power into one large ball and threw it. It was faster than the previous ones, even for its size. The blonde backflipped over the plasma ball, then did a series of sideflips as Shego rapid-fired smaller but faster bolts at her. Then, as she came to a stop from her flips, she realized that the green woman was charging in, claws at the ready.

Tara ducked down under the flaming swipe, the heat slightly singeing her hair, before jumping back up and lashing a finger out.

“Boop!” The blonde slowed her finger juuuuust a bit and poked the raging woman on the nose.

Shego jerked back as if hit, taking several steps back away from the blonde. Her nostrils flared several times, her angry gaze switching between Tara and her boss. Then, like a balloon, she seemed to deflate, the anger draining from her...

“This isn’t worth it.” She threw a glare at Doctor D. “ _You’re_ not worth it.” She flipped her hair over her shoulders and turned away. It wasn’t stomping, not quite, but it certainly wasn’t a dignified walking away either.

She walked out to the veranda and practically vanished into the shadows...

Things were quiet and still for at least a minute. Maybe more.

“Ugh! I thought that’d _never_ end…!” Bonnie marched into the middle of the open space. Raising her voice, she proclaimed, “Like, show’s over! Get back to mingling or whatever you were do-..”

Suddenly the doors on the far side of the room crumbled in a loud ‘ **bang!’**. Like ants, a wave of people came streaming in and around the room. Tara kinda recognized the outfit… It looked like the sort of thing that Doctor Director wore. More padded, with riot shields and helmets, but still similar enough to notice.

Doctor D stood like a statue, clearly not noticing what was going on as he still stared at the space where Shego had stalked off. All the villains in the room seemed to panic at the sudden intrusion, trying to make their way out through the various open spaces and doors in the room.

Save one.

The man with the one eye ran to the wall near the refreshment table and hit a brick. The wall swooshed around on a pivot and ate him up. Gone like the wind.

It seemed to be the smart move as the people in the same outfits came streaming down from the ceiling to block off access to the veranda. They _also_ apparently raided the mansion in other places as the flow of villains reversed, being forced back into the large room by smaller floods of people.

Tara had no idea what was going on, but as long as the fighting stopped she was okay with it.

She got a _better_ idea when Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable walked in through the bigger set of doors, both wearing outfits even _more_ similar to Doctor Director’s.

They strode in, all straight and professional-like. ...well, Kim did at least. Ron couldn’t manage it instead traipsing in with a curious look on his face.

“..-bother with sauce at that stage. I mean, hello? It’s called _al dente_ for a reason!”

“Ron, focus!” The redhead marched to the center of the room, the agents parting way as if a mystical force was pushing them. Oh! Maybe it was Ron’s mystical mojo power? She didn’t know how it worked. It must be really convenient at concerts and stuff!

Bonnie did the same, meeting Kim in the middle. She growled, “Like, what gives you the right to ruin my party, _K_?”

“International warrants,” the apparent GJ agent said simply.

“Yeah! We have the warrant-y thing that let us do it,” Ron chimed in.

The tanned woman harrumphed and turned to her father-in-law who was also emerging from the crowd. “Can they do this?”

“I am not sure…” he murmured in reply. “My island is an independent nation… Surely...” He then said a combination of legalese that made Tara question if she heard anything English in any of what he said.

“International warrants trump-..,” the redhead insisted in more legalese. Tara wasn’t so sure about it, but it wasn’t like she’d studied international relations or anything.

“But if you consider-..” Even _more_ legalese! Did Kim go to law school while Tara wasn’t watching? Was Bonnie’s father-in-law a lawyer?

While Kim and Bonnie’s in-law were arguing, Ron made his way over to the food table. He looked at the fancy stuff available and skipped over the lasagna - how rude! - and went straight for the thing Tara had been trying to ignore with all her might: the oysters. Why, oh why, did there have to be oysters?

He hemmed and hawed at the selection before picking a shucked oyster up and sniffing at it.

“Uh, Ron? That’s shellfish…” Tara reminded him. Silly boy, forgetting his banned foods.

“Ohhhh… Yeah, ‘cause of the shell and being Jewish and all…” He set it back down on the plate.

“Ew! Loser germs!” Bonnie had appeared behind them. She grabbed the touched oyster and tossed it across the room. A faint cry of “Ouch!” sounded from where she’d tossed it in a familiar, high-pitched voice.

Kim growled in reply to one of the barbs Bonnie’s father-in-law threw, then dismissively said, “We’ll sort this out _later_. For now,” she walked away from the older man, eyes scanning the crowd, “we’re looking for a specific individual.” As if announcing something super big, she said his name ominously. “Gemini. Where is he?”

No one moved or said anything.

“Y’know, big guy, one eye, mecha hand?” the sidekick made like an explosion with his hands, even as he molested some of the fancy bread that was with the lasagna. “Bwaah with the missile fingers? Likes to punish his underlings?”

Tara had it at ‘mecha hand’. “Ohhhh! I know! I know!” She waved an arm enthusiastically, even as Doctor D tried to hush her with a sweaty look on his face.

Ron and Kim both shouted, “TARA?!” They gaped at her.

“Hi guys!” She beamed. “I know where he went!”

The redhead shook her head and got her ‘mission mode’ face on. “Where did he go?”

“That way!” She pointed at the wall.

“Shush, Missy… You don’t know what you’re doing,” her boss sing-songed quietly.

“Yeah, that just looks like a wall,” Ron said, going through the crowd and over to it, tapping at several of the bricks.

“Not _those_ !” Tara marched through the crowd to the wall and looked carefully. Triumphantly, she cried, “ _This_ one!” and pushed the special brick twice. This caused the super secret passage to flip around twice, dragging Tara and Ron around for the swift ride.

“Ugh… Not good for the tummy…” The blond grabbed at his stomach as he looked about the room. “At least there aren’t any clowns around this ti-..” He cut off as his eyes settled on a specific figure. Tara didn’t understand… Why did the one clown in the sea of people look angry, and produce an umbrella?

Before Tara could ask, Kim raced over to the wall.

“Ron, you ready?” she asked, positioning her hand over the brick while simultaneously shooing Tara away.

“Ready as ever, KP!” A flash of blue in his eyes caught the blonde’s attention. Or was there? ...it was probably a trick of the light.

“Let’s go!” She pushed the brick…

And they were gone.

Things were quiet for a few moments. One specific agent guy with a smarmy haircut walked out to the open area between the villains and most of the agent people.

He coughed.

And suddenly, **_EVERYONE_ ** was moving!

Projectiles of all kinds began flying through the air, even as the two sides began to physically clash.

Electrically-charged wires from various watches the agent guys were wearing.

A small rubber ball that morphed into a giant bouncy ball mid-flight, crushing several agents.

Laser pistols firing, knocking out several of the villains.

Razor-sharp feathers flying from the big-nosed guy’s cape and sticking into several agent’s armor.

Electrical arcs shocking some of the agents as the wire-haired woman apologized profusely.

Candles and food from all the tables PLOP into faces.

The guy with the bad haircut was doing stiff yet effective judo chops and dodges.

A bald guy in a power suit blasting several buffed-up agent guys with what looked like a green laser thing.

Claws and fists, shock sticks and quarterstaves, mad science-y gizmos and sciencetastic equipment all clashing with sparks and flames and war cries.

And there was Tara, just standing there while all the craziness went on.

...fiddlesticks.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of the chapter will change the way you saw Tara the entire party. :o Poor Tara...

Okay. So. What does one do when the party has literally turned into a free-for-all fight and you can’t just leave or call the police because GJ was already there and the private mercs had already washed their hands of it?

…

…

...

Under the table it was!

One of the tables had been flipped over, but the one that had the lasagna and oysters was still sitting solidly. Probably because the lasagna was hot and heavy and no one liked oysters.

She dove under with a tuck-and-roll, landing very solidly underneath the large buffet-style table.

Now that she was safely ensconced in the space… ...what did she do now? It wasn’t like she was the master of stealth, or fighting. She was lucky she even made it under the table in one piece!

Suddenly her boss rolled under the table with a loud “Ack!”

“Oh! Heya Doctor D~” Tara waved. “What are you doing here?”

“I saw you duck for cover when all this lunacy started, so I figured it wouldn’t be a half-bad idea to join you. Besides…” he waved at his behind “I don’t want a repeat of _this_.” Now that she was looking, Tara noticed that several of the bird villain’s feather-darts were lodged pretty solidly in his rear. Hopefully it was stuck in the layers of his outfit... 

A minute or so passed, during which her boss removed the feathers with slight whimpering. It felt and sounded like another table had been broken or overturned. “So…” She began rocking back and forth. Hiding out was pretty boring. “...did you wanna play rock-paper-scissors?”

“Nnnngh… This is just great!” Her boss slapped his hand against his face as the table shook around them. “All I wanted to do was eat cake and talk about how smart I am. Not…” he waved his hands in the direction of the fight “...whatever all of _this_ is.”

Extra tragic because there _was_ no cake… It was all a lie...

Suddenly, an explosion rocked the building.

“And now things are EXPLODING!” Drew threw his hands up as best he could in the confined space. “What next?!”

Then the table flipped over, a set of agents and a really reeeeeaaaaalllllly large ninja flying overhead in a tangle.

Tara gave her boss a _look_.

“Yeah, yeah, I asked for it,” he said, standing up and ducking down at the same time.

She wanted to keep the _look_ up, but gave it up after a taser cable whizzed by inches from her head. “What’ll we do, Doctor D?” the blonde whispered, trying to keep her voice down. Even if it was super loud, you never knew who could hear you.

“We _get out of here_ is what we do!” Drew pulled a weird device out of his secret-pocket-that-wasn’t-secret and pushed a couple of buttons on it. He grumbled quietly, “This had better work… I spent _days_ trying to get this right…!”

He dramatically pushed the last, big, red button on the device and crowed, waving his hand in the air while doing so.

Several seconds went by with nothing happening.

“...why isn’t this working?” He shook the controller thing he had, listening to it intently, then pushed the button again.

Again, nothing.

“Why.” Hit! “Isn’t.” Wham! “This.” Slap! “Working?!” Slam Whap Bap Push!

Several more seconds. Several more nothings.

“Ugh!” He repocketed the device, vines flailing around him in frustration, and grunted, “So much for _that_ … Wasted several nights for _nothing_ …!”

“I think that-..” Tara cut herself off as she dodged a flying power cell thrown by a villain cursing out the blaster gun in their hands.

“Ithinkthatlet’sgetoutofhere,” she said in one breath, worrying about the possibly radioactive piece of equipment that was now sitting a couple of feet behind her.

“Agreed!” He grabbed her arm and started dragging her towards the nearest doorway, vines still trailing around him.

They dodged behind a thin middle aged man with plain brown hair, a rather large round nose, a tasteful gray and blue pinstriped suit, finished nicely with a tasteful, herringbone-patterned tie. Tara wondered why a guy, who looked like a middle school teacher, was doing there, when he started shouting in a pleasant, broadcast quality baritone, "Behold my power, you weaklings! You shall not capture me, for I am THE Weatherman!"

He screamed wordlessly after his generic speech, apparently aiming a floating cloud at several agents. Hail burst forth from the cloud and pelted the men with several-inch round balls of ice.

The two scientists didn’t get away unscathed, though, as the backdraft from the storm whipped Tara’s hair to ruin and froze poor Doctor D’s plants! They didn’t deserve that!

“Ouchy ouchy ouch ouch ouch!” her boss chanted, holding some of his vines like they were themselves hurting him. Weird… Since when did that happen? Or did it always happen?

“Oops!” She was so busy thinking her thoughts that she almost got hit by a thrown pie… Which promptly melted the pillar she was next to. Tara gaped at the resulting hole. “Oh gosh…”

“Not the time to space off, Missy!” Doctor D resumed dragging her towards the portal. They were almost home free!

Then someone shoved Tara to the side and jumped in front of Drew.

“Dementor! You clod!” Her boss waved a fist at him. “Where do you get off getting in our way?!”

“Because _I_ vant to ESCAPE und hyu are a LOSER!” Dementor cried, shoving Tara even _more_ aside than she already had been and running to the doorway.

He almost made it through the door…

Almost.

Like magic, the guy with the bad haircut from earlier popped up out of nowhere.

“Leaving so soon, Dementor?” he said in an obvious attempt to be witty. It failed. But what _didn’t_ fail was his aiming with his watch, which was spot-on to hit the villain in the chest.

“Uck! Hyu heroes and hyur ANTICS!” The helmeted man shrugged and reached into his belt before pulling out a small ball of sorts. “Ah, vat can one do…” He then tossed it at the agent.

The agent promptly pulled out a small ray gun and shot the ball. It froze in mid-air before falling harmlessly to the ground, shattering on impact.

“Nice try with the bondo-ball,” the smarmy man tsked. “We know about it, and have sufficient countermeasures…”

“You haff GOT to be KIDDING ME!” Dementor growled. “Do not make me pull out MINE BIG GUNS!”

“As if you would dar-..” The agent was tackled mid-word by a football-themed villain. If Tara didn’t know better, she would’ve thought it was Brick!

Dementor ran through the now-open doorway. A mere second later, he was forced out by a rough-looking, buff agent wielding a riot shield and waving around a shock stick.

“C’mon!” Her boss ducked behind a pillar as Dementor started dodging and dancing around the big guy’s attacks. After looking around for a moment, her boss began to scoot along the wall, clearly trying to make himself a smaller target. Considering how the fighting seemed to be condensing into the middle where clear battle lines were being drawn, and all the other exit points were blocked, Tara didn’t disagree with the decision. She, too, began to strafe the wall like a secret agent afraid of getting caught.

Slowly, they made their way along the side wall towards the veranda. Then they could go around the mansion to the hovercar and get the heck out of there!

“FREEZE, Doctor Drakken!” A couple of agents jumped in their way. Drat! They’d almost made it! But that was an awful mistake they were making…

“Nono, _not_ Drakken,” Tara corrected. “He’d _Doctor Lipsky_ , thank you very much!”

“Not the time, Missy!” her boss said. He raised his fist at the two and snarled, “Out of our way! We aren’t even villains; we were tricked into coming to this party!”

The agents both shared a chuckle. “Yeah, I’m so sure of _that_ ,” one of them said. “Just like how that gal right there isn’t your new sidekick.”

“ _Assistant_ ,” Tara insisted. Man, these guys were really bad with names and labels.

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Either which way, you’re coming with _us_.” They raised their wrists threateningly.

Just to get crushed into the wall by the head of a massive hammer.

“I had said zat I vould bring out mine BIG GUNS, und I vas not JOKING!” Dementor stood beside them, the handle of said massive hammer in his hand. It was a crazy-cool hammer, too, with a rocket jet on one end and a pointy tip on the other. Luckily, the agents were both hit by the non-sharp sides of the front of the hammer.

...where had he been keeping that?

“We didn’t need your help, _Demenz_ ,” Doctor D sneered.

“Zen maybe hyu should-..” A wave of sound blasted by his head and blew into the wall beside them. Turning his head, he uttered, “Vait… Is zat Ze Silver Blaster?!”

Dementor and Drew both stopped, gaping at a dark-skinned woman whose black hair, slightly shorter than Tara’s, was sticking out of the back of a large helmet with a face shield and fancy-looking earmuffs. She had a basic sleek silver bodysuit on, but the remarkable part was her arms and legs. Attached to them were black wrecking ball-shaped speakers which were blasting out sound/air waves at anyone and everyone that was getting in her way.

“I thought she only operated out off Australia?!” her boss proclaimed.

Ze Silver Blaster? That sounded familiar…

Doctor D saw her expression and commented, “She’s one of the ‘new’ generation of villains that popped up after the whole Lorwardian debacle.” Snorting, he noted, “Bah! Like that somehow makes them ‘better’ than the rest of us… Even if she _is_ very successful...”

“The rest of us?” Tara gave her boss the _look_ again.

Her boss cringed. “I, ah, mean, the rest of _them_?”

Tara’s expression brightened considerably. “Good!”

But…

It was bothering her. Why did Ze Silver Blaster sound so familiar?

Tara took a closer look at the villain who was now cackling with glee right next to the ponderous assistant.

...wait a sec… That hair, that skin, those eyes...

"Hope?” The dark-haired villain turned around, lifted her suit’s visor, and gave Tara a wink in reply.

Wow! Talk about a cheer reunion! _Now_ Tara knew why Ze Silver Blaster sounded familiar… It was what Hope had said her ‘villain’ name would be when they were all joking one day and teasing Kim, except when they’d been talking she had said ‘the’, not ‘ze’. Tara had gone with The Dazzler, but the other girls thought it was too outdated or something lame like that.

“You're into villainy?"

"Oh, I SO am!” Hope tittered as she kicked away another agent, “I mean, it's a blast, and B set me up SO nice…” She practically danced around Tara, knocking agents and villains alike away from the two of them. “I have this sweet beachfront lair near the Sydney Opera House, and I’m trying to set up a small timeshare lair in Lowerton to stretch out my operation."

“You’ve been _real_ busy…”

“No kidding!” The other woman laughed, loosening a blob of energy from her gauntlets.

“Soooo… You and B hanging out a lot then?” Tara figured that since they were hanging out right now, they could at least catch up on things. Especially since her boss and the Dementor guy were now arguing like B and K used to…

“Und your clothes are RIDICULOUS!” He waved his hand at the doctor, as if brushing dust off his jacket, even as he backhanded someone with his hammer. “Who vould PURPOSELY DRESS like a homeless person!?”

“Says the man wearing a bowl on his head!” Doctor D wasn’t paying attention as he was glaring daggers at the shorter man, but his vines intercepted a couple of projectiles and tossed them back in the directions they came from.

“Like, we did a lot of hanging out back just after we graduated… Well,” Hope cringed “when _the two of us_ graduated. Bonnie’s still taking those summer classes… Anyway…” She loosed another blast that cleared out a small section of the fight, sending several people flying a few feet. “Bonnie and I were hanging out a _lot_ when we first started into villainy, about a week or so after that rockin’ beach party.”

A villain wearing springs on his feet bounced past, nearly smacking into Tara and dodging around Hope’s clothesline. As that happened, the blonde noticed the wire-haired woman from earlier was trying -  and failing - to interrupt the two arguing men as they offhandedly assaulted anyone who came within reach. Save for that woman, apparently. Why or how the two men didn’t attack her, Tara wasn’t sure. 

“Wow! Only a week?” The blonde came back to the conversation and boggled. That meant that they’d hopped to it several months ago!

“Yup!” Hope laughed. “It took a _lot_ of convincing to get me to go along with it. But once Bonnie and I pulled our first caper - stealing a few diamonds from a high-end jewelry boutique in London - I just couldn’t help but fall in _love_ with it.” A contented sigh escaped her lips even as she backhanded an agent. “The freedom, the excitement, the glamour…” She made a face. “But Bonnie… I don’t know…

“The wonderfulness of stealing whatever she wanted just didn’t seem to click with her. She struggled. Like, _really_ struggled…”

“With what?” The blonde was thoroughly confused. Since when did Bonnie _ever_ struggle with _anything_?

“Everything.” Hope pouted. “She was fine at first, really grabbing what she wanted and not caring about it… But then she started asking silly questions after our first run-in with heroes in this nowhere town called Go City. ‘Why don’t we just pay for it?’ ‘What’s wrong with, like, not going to jail?’ ‘Won’t this hurt someone who’s trying to make a living?’. Just a barrage of questions that don’t really have a place in villainy, y’know?”

“I guess…” It would’ve made Tara uncomfortable too. Then again, she wasn’t a villain.

“So yeah. She’s kinda been withdrawing a bit. I don’t get it myself,” Hope shrugged, then punched a nearby villain apparently just because. “I guess the lifestyle isn’t for everyone…”

“I guess.” Tara repeated, more sure of the actual answer. Maybe that’s why-..

Another explosion rocked the building. “Op! Gotta run! Hafta save whatever’s left of the basement for my villains-in-arms.” Hope gave the blonde a biiiiiiiig hug. “It was great chatting!”

“Yup!” The assistant beamed. “Next time, we can chat about how things are on my end.”

“That’ll be peachy! Maybe next I’ll raid wherever you work and hold you hostage so we can do this again,” Hope joked. ...hopefully. “Later!” With that, she ran off towards the super secret wall with the super secret brick.

“Wow!” Tara breathed a sigh. Talking to a villain mid-fight sure was draining. Speaking of mid-fight…

“Boss? We have to-..” she paused, taking in the scene in front of her.

“Ich bin der BESTE BöSEWICHT aller ZEITEN!” Dementor yelled from his mountain of people whom he had knocked out with a combination of his hammer and various gadgets, such as the aforementioned bondo-ball and a weird melty power his hands had.

“Yeah, yeah, you and your _German_ stuff.” Her boss waved him off, even as he unknowingly held several unconscious people, villains and agents alike, in the grip of his vines. “We all know you’re German, no need to yell it.”

“I do not CARE vut hyu TINK!” the helmeted villain said in a thicker accent, even as he growled at the dismissiveness. “Hyu are a TERRIBLE VILLAIN!”

“At least I’m a decent hero!” He then noticed all the people he was holding. “Erm, anti-hero?”

“Vatever. All zat matters is zat I am BETTER ZAN HYU!”

“You are NOT better than me. You’re just…” Doctor D struggled with a word that would put him in a better light than the guy that was clearly a better villain than him. “You’re doing unusually well.”

“HA!”

“Doctor D…” Tara walked over to her boss and grabbed at his arm. “We need to get out of here!”

“Hm?” He looked around as if he’d forgotten that there was a knock-down, drag-out fight going on around them. “Oh! Right. Uhm…” His vines dropped the people roughly and retracted. “Erm…”

“Zis vay, hyu VEAK EXCUSE of a VILLAIN!” Dementor waved his hammer in the direction of the veranda, the path clear as if people were trying to get out of the way of the hammer which, at this point, may have been on purpose.

“How many times do I have to say that I am NOT A VILLAIN!” Her boss stomped his foot in frustration like a child.

“Iff hyu are not a villain, vhy do you DRESS LIKE VON?!” the helmeted villain shouted, beginning to walk towards the veranda.

“Hey! I have a ‘look’.” Her boss marched next to Dementor, determined to not fall behind him. “What, do you want me to take a vow of peace or something? ‘Cause _that_ isn’t going to happen!”

“Vell, perhaps hyu could at least change your style?” Dementor shrugged. “Hyu vould look better in someting vite, or more protective? Hyu are very bad vith the whole hurting yourself ting…”

As they walked out onto the veranda, they found the hovercar was floating towards them at a leisurely pace.

“Oh! _Now_ it works! Wonderful!” her boss groused. He pulled the remote thing out again and glared at it. “Stupid piece of junk.”

“At least it vorked, unlike hyur VILLAINOUS CAREER!”

“Shove it!”

The two men turned to each other.

“Vell… Zat vas not awful.” Dementor held out his hand. “I suppose I vill see you later, ven I inevitably ROB ze SPACE CENTER?”

Drew stared at the hand for a second before taking it and shaking. “I guess I will, Loser.”

“Ha! Zat is ze funny.” The helmeted villain gave a jovial laugh before turning and practically skipping away towards the parking area.

“Thinks he’s so smart…” Doctor D made a strangling motion, then sighed. “Oh well. That’s Dementor for you.”

“Let’s _go_ before-..”

“HEY!”

Tara froze, then cringed. Great, _now_ who was going to confront-..

Ohwait, that voice was Bonnie’s.

“B!” The blonde turned in the direction of her friend. “I was worried you-..” She cut off her words when she caught sight of the homecoming queen.

Her dress? Torn and ragged. Crown? Sideways. Face? Definitely developing a bruise. Footwear? One shoe was MIA.

“Oh B…” Tara walked over to where her friend was standing awkwardly, clearly in pain, and put a hand on the tanned woman’s arm. “Do you need help?”

“Like, of _course_ I don’t!” Bonnie removed the hand and growled, “I just need these losers to leave my house. Papi said he’s arranging for some people called the Golden Company or whatever to come clean up.”

“It’s never too early to line up a cleaning service,” the blonde said with a nod.

“Right…” Bonnie trailed off. “You’re leaving, huh?” B looked at the waiting hovercar and turned around. Bonnie said, annoyance clear with a hidden hint of defeat, “Like, just _go_.”

The blonde paused in hopping back into her boss’ hovercar. She just had to know one thing before she left…

“Why did you invite a clown to your party?”

Bonnie paused, turned around, then pouted, “ _I_ didn’t. Papi liked the work he did with Ron and the circus stuff.”

“Oh.” That was pretty anticlimactic. “Well… I’ll see you later, B.”

Bonnie looked hopeful at that. “Really, T?”

“Really really.” Tara nodded.

“You done yet?” Her boss revved the engine of his hovercar. “I’d prefer not to get caught up in that silliness again.”

“Just a sec!” Tara gave her friend a quick hard hug. “I’m rooting for you, B.”

A pause. “Thanks, T.”

Tara turned and hopped into the waiting hovercar.

As they were flying away, flashes of green caught her attention. Looking down, she noticed that Shego had, apparently, not gotten away like it had seemed she would. In the middle of the lawn the green woman almost looked to be dancing around. Upon closer inspection, Tara realized there was someone else there. She looked to be in a fight with…

Doctor Director? That was weird…

The two women were moving with such speed and power - Shego tore clean through one of the pieces of metal littering the lawn - that Tara was _certain_ Shego had been toying with her earlier.

Yikes.

“What’s wrong?” her boss asked, looking back at her.

“Uhm, nothing!” Tara moved to block his sight and gave the most innocent smile she could muster.

He narrowed his eyes. “...you have something on your teeth.”

“What!?” the blonde pulled out a mirror from her own hidden pocket and checked. Sure enough, there was some stray lipstick smeared on her two front teeth. “Dang it!”


	13. Chapter 13

"So then… Who was right?"

Doctor D grunted but said nothing as he stood bent over next to her and dismantled another finagly little piece in the Lorwardian walker.

"Hmmmm?" The svelte blonde bother bother bothered the blue man more, elbowing him in the side from where she sat while wearing a cat-like grin.

This time Doctor Lipsky muttered something that was itty bitty quiet. Tara didn't think she could've understood it even with one of those hearing horn things!

Vivian smiled wider. "What was that?"

Suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box, he straightened straight up, nearly knocking his head into Vivian's. Growling, he snapped, "YOU were! YOU were right!"

"About…?" She was being a meanie at this point. Rubbing it in like a gritty salty wound.

"That stupid party!" Doctor D stomped his foot like a really upset child. "I can't believe I fell for it!"

Tara sighed, flopping her head on the small card table they had set up a short ways away from the walker. "Same here! When B said that she was in a different crowd, I didn't think she meant villains!"

Her boss gave Tara the evil eye. "This was entirely your fault!"

"What?" She began to pout. "How was it my fault?"

"Because…" He'd had his finger pointed at her in consternation, but it fell a little as he thought on why it was her fault. A strange look crossed his face before he shook his head and grumbled, "Because because!"

"That's not a reason!" Tara pouted harder. "You just want to blame someone!"

"When you should really be blaming yourself for not listening to me~" Vivian sing-songed, leaning back in her chair.

"Hmph!" Doctor D crossed his arms, the little tiny doohickey wrench thing he was holding tinkling against the button on his jacket as he glowered at the older blonde. "If you were so sure you were right, then you should've tried harder to stop us!"

"You're adults." Vivian shrugged. "Far be it for me to tell you what to do. I'm just trying to be a consul for you two."

"Yeah, you're right," Tara said with wiggly eyes, also admitting defeat. "We should've listened to you."

"It was a _complete_ bust, from beginning to end!" Doctor D threw his poor wrench thing on the ground. "I ran into Shego _and_ Dementor, didn't get to try _any_ of the food, got stuck in that fight…!" He grumble grumbled like a grumbly thing. "The only bright spot was talking with that woman with the wires for hair, and even _that_ was cut short!"

"Wires for hair?" Vivian straightened up, giving the bad doctor a calculating look.

"Yes!" He nodded a little too enthusiastically. " _She_ was nice to talk to. I cut that discussion short, though, when I put two and two together about what that party was exactly!"

"What were you two talking about?" Tara remembered something about something, but not what that something was.

"How easy it is to manipulate ohm's law," he said narrowing his eyes at the junior scientist. "You know, the _thing_ you keep arguing _can't happen_?"

"Yeah yeah, you know better than I do," she muttered, waving a hand dismissively. "What got you on that topic?"

"She'd asked what I'd been working on lately. Was still thinking about that wire…" He giggled like he did when he thought he was outsmarting everyone. "Those idiot Lorwardians have it far more complicated than it really should be!"

"How can you simplify it more than a single wire?" Vivian asked with a raised eyebrow.

Doctor D chuckled. "They were using _far_ too thick of a wire for it to be efficient! They would've almost been better off not even trying." He began to scratch his chin in thought. "Though that one lady, she did bring up a point about maybe trying to use the chassis material for a little experiment…"

"Her name's Electra," the older blonde said wryly.

Tara's eyebrows rose in tandem. How did Vivian know the name of a random villainess? Oh no! Was she developing psychic powers like James and Drew? That would stink! Then Tara would be the only one that didn't have them!

"Yeah yeah, Electra, whatever…" He snorted. "We had that pleasant conversation, and then for some reason while I was arguing with Dementor she handed me a piece of paper with a bunch of numbers on it."

"Numbers?" Vivian's lip twitched. "Did it start with an eight?"

The doctor squinted his eyes in thought. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

Curiosity tinged the svelte woman's voice as she queried, "What did you do with it?"

"What? The paper?" At Vivian's nod, Doctor Drew grumbled, "Clearly it was some kind of codex or something. I'm not a numbers fan like that. I'm sure it was a fun little game for her, but I don't like them!" He nodded as he said, "So I tossed it over the side of my hover car when we were heading back. I'm not about to waste my time doing one of those!"

Vivian began to laugh.

"What?" Doctor D tilted his head. "What's so funny?"

The older blonde had a few false starts, but eventually was able to choke out, "That was her _phone number_ , you doofus!"

The blue man gaped at her. "But, but it wasn't ten digits…?"

"She lives in Russia," Vivian said like it was obvious.

"Okay, so, maybe some of us don't know what that means?" Tara stated definitely only for Doctor D's clarification. Because she _definitely_ knew what the other blonde was talking about. Definitely.

"They have a different phone system than in the US," Vivian explained, a wide smirk on her face. "They have more numbers to their phone numbers than we do."

"And you think she willingly, intentionally gave me her phone number?" Doctor D asked skeptically.

"Yeah," the older blonde confirmed. "She probably enjoyed the discussion you two were having and wanted to keep it going."

"Gah!" Tara's boss frantically brushed his hands through his hair. "I was so busy arguing with Dementor that I didn't catch what she was telling me…" He scowled. "Leave it to Dementor to ruin something just by being there!"

"Maybe you shouldn't have been rude and actually listened to what she was saying," Tara tsked as she lifted her head all the way up from the card table.

"Shorty's got a point there," Vivian agreed.

"Hmph!" He tightly crossed his arms. "How was _I_ supposed to know that she wanted to continue the conversation with me?"

"By doing exactly what I just said to do and listen to her?" Tara asked, blinking. Sometimes her boss was really bad at listening and understanding. Just the cause of his current issue. He needed to put some skill points into active listening…

"I meant, why would she want to continue a talk we were having?" Doctor D flumped up against the table he'd been working at.

"Because she enjoyed it. You aren't a bad conversationalist when you're talking about something you know about," Vivian noted. Raising an elegant eyebrow, she teased, "I know it's been a while since that's happened to you, but for _normal_ people continuing a pleasant conversation is a no-brainer."

His face lit up like a plum as he spluttered, "Well, erm, I mean… Gah!" He seemed to regain some of his composure as he snarled, "Well _excuse me_ for falling outside the average percentile!"

"It's okay!" Tara said, waving her arms in what she was hoping was a calming manner. "Some people just aren't very good at being social."

"Like you," Vivian noted while looking at Doctor D. Man, Vivian was being really mean today!

Tara's boss fumed, but said nothing to that. Instead, he grumbled, "What do I do now? It's not like I can exactly search her first name and a description on the internet and find her again."

"I think I could probably wrangle her number for you…" the older blonde said with a sneaky tone in her voice.

"I sense a 'but'," he said flatly.

"But…" Vivian said it with an enormous grin on her face. Clearly they were playing a psychic game. No fair for Tara! As Tara began to pout, the other blonde continued, "...I want _you_ to start helping _me_ with _my_ projects."

"Your projects?" Tara boggled, blinking. Then it hit her. Of _course_ Doctor Porter has her own projects! She's a super scientist for the space center too! How could Tara have forgotten that?

"What in the world could I help out with?" Doctor D asked in a whining tone.

"Well, my big project is about increasing the decision-making capabilities of my robots," Vivian said with a confident smirk. "And considering you've made full-blown autonomous entities…"

"Yeah, entities that _rebelled_ ," Tara's boss grumped.

"Eric didn't," Vivian rebutted. "He listened to you."

His face soured even more. "Eric was special. Unique. He was my so-.." He cut himself off, then tried again. "I…" he struggled with his words, eventually settling with, "...I can't replicate him."

Eric… That sounded fami-.. OH! THAT Eric! The evil-robot-thingy Eric. Weird. Now that Tara thought about it, her boss never ever brought him up in conversation before save for that brief thing several weeks ago when they were talking about nicknames. Eric seemed like one of his more successful projects! Why didn't he gloat about it like he did with other stuff?

Vivian's brow furrowed. "You okay there, Drew?"

"I'm fine!" he snapped at her, his face wibble-wobbling between a kicked puppy and a raging old man. "Just fine! I just… I don't like to think about him, that's all."

"Hm…" Vivian pondered for a few moments.

Tara joined her in the pondering. Like, why did he not like thinking about Eric? Was he secretly a bad robot that stayed out too late and left his bed a mess? Or did he not like thinking about his magnum opus plot failing when it was so close to winning?

"'Hm' _what_?!" Doctor D snarled, pounding a fist on the table while glaring at Vivian. Tara could tell he was purposely making himself angry. Why? She had no idea! Sometimes it just seemed like he liked being angry for the sake of being angry.

"...nothing." Vivian shook her head. "I get that we can't take a shot at making another Eric…" Tara's boss started to deflate. "...but…" And suddenly he was puffing up again! Neat party trick! Tara wished he would tell her how he did it! Vivian rushed, "that still leaves us with the Bebe design to work with!"

He sniffed the air and snarled, then turned away from the table and began to pace at an alarming speed.

Vivian twirled around in her chair to watch him. Again, Tara joined her. They watched him walk back and forth. Back and forth. Baaaaack and fooooorth.

His pacing was slowing down now. He was also muttering under his breath. For _this_ one she thought she could've heard him with the ear horn thing.

After another minute of just him pacing around and whispering to himself, the older blonde finally let out an exasperated sigh. She flopped back against the table and asked, irritated, "Are you going to help me out or not?"

"Hm?" Doctor Lipsky did a small double-take and blinked before he stopped walking. He probably forgot they were there again. Shaking his head, he murmured, "Yeah, sure, I'll help with your silly little project."

Vivian pumped a fist in the air and joyfully hissed, "Yesss!"

"BUT!"

The svelte blonde paused mid-celebration and looked up at him, confused. "But what? You're getting Electra's phone number!"

"I know where this is going to lead, mi-.." his eyes darted to Tara for a second "...erm… _Vivian_. I'm not an idiot!" He walked over to her and bent over so they were looking straight into each other's eyes. Tara wished she could call it romantic. If only he didn't have a sourpuss expression on his face… Heedless of her thoughts, his psychic powers not kicking in this time, he growled, "You're going to publish the results of your research somewhere. I want in!"

"Oh, like how you were going to give me and kiddo over there credit for helping with the walker?" the older blonde shot back.

He frowned harder. "You two are just helping me take it apart! You aren't going around identifying and logging everything!"

"Excuses excuses…" Vivian shook her head. "If that were the case, research teams wouldn't exist!"

Somehow he frowned _even harder_. "Bah!" He stood back up and tightly crossed his arms. "Fine! Just fine! I'll give you and Missy credit on my work _if_ you give me credit on yours! Goodness knows I _deserve_ it, what with you 'borrowing' some of my Bebe tech already!"

Tara blinked. Taking everything into account, Doctor D was giving up a _lot_ more than he was getting. He must be feeling a lot more generous than he's acting!

Vivian smirked, then held out a hand. "It's a deal! We'll trade credit on our projects, you'll help me with my work, and I'll give you Electra's phone number."

Tentatively, the bad doctor took her proffered hand and shook it.

Her smirk turned a little bit evil. Was it wrong that Tara was hearing the other blonde cackling in her head? It must be her psychic powers manifesting!

Her boss took his hand back and wiped it on his coat before scratching his nose. At Vivian's offended look, he defended, "Your hand is dirty!"

The older blonde looked at her hands, which were streaked with gritty black stripes. "What do you know? My hands ARE dirty!" Looking up from her hands to Doctor Drew, she asked with quirked lips, "What kind of scientist doesn't like to get down and dirty with their field of study?"

He bristled. " _I_ do, if I can help it! I _like_ being clean!"

Tara perked up. Oh! Ohohoh! Was he going to finally divulge his secret to how he stays so clean all the time?

Vivian's expression turned impish. "Well then…" She stood from her chair and strutted over to the blue man. "If that's the case…"

She briefly paused in front of the blue man, looking to be thinking, before she lightning-fast struck! Her hands smeared themselves across his face and coat as she laughed like a maniac. Doctor D jumped back too late, the black smudges standing out against his skin. His coat looked fine overall; hard to see the black through the dark blue.

"What the-..!? Why would you-..?!" His mouth flopped open and closed a few times before he asked, "What was _that_ for?!"

"Now you'll have to go home and wash up!" Vivian said gleefully. "That's industrial-grade oil. The bathrooms here aren't equipped to get _that_ off!"

Doctor D's face purpled again. "I just-.. You just-.. Nnnngh…!"

After letting out another, smaller eeeeevil cackle, Vivian seemed to calm down. She scooted over and elbowed him in the side. "Hey. Just wondering, when was the last time you went home?"

"Home?" He tilted his head.

"Home?" Tara echoed, thinking. Did Doctor Lipsky _have_ a home? By this point Tara just assumed he'd moved into the lab full-time and had a hidden cubby in one of the corners where he kept all his things.

"I, erm…" Doctor D thought on it. Then he began counting with his fingers. He went over so many times that Tara _hoped_ he was counting days! After several iterations, he stopped counting and cringed. "It's, uhm, been a while."

"So why don't you listen to me and _go home_?"

"Hmph!" He wiped a finger across his face, snorting and growling when it came back dirty. Suddenly pouting, he grumbled, "It looks like I'll _have to_ to get this grimy junk off!"

"Good!" Vivian spun him around and began pushing him towards the door. "No time like the present to get that taken care of!"

Doctor Lipsky let himself be pushed in the general direction of the door before suddenly stiffening and shouting, "Wait!"

The older blonde paused. "What's up?" Her eyes narrowed slyly. "Chickening out?"

"My notebook!" he cried, sending the junior scientist a glare. "You'd have to be _crazy_ to think that I'm leaving that anywhere _near_ where that snake of a board member can get his grimy hands on it!"

Tara slapped her forehead. "Oh! Right!" And here she'd been ready to help Vivian push him out the door! Smiling brightly, the young blonde asked, "Didja want me to fetch it, Doctor D?"

"I can _fetch it myself_ when I get over there!" he grumped. Suddenly, he jolted like he'd gotten a brain flash. A smirk flitted across his face as he said, "But you know what you two could do while I'm out?"

"Keep working?" Vivian asked, cocking a hip.

"Well, yes, that goes without saying. BUT!" He raised a hand in the air, pointer finger stretched like he was trying to touch the ceiling. It was over 30 feet away! ...or was that 300 feet? ...either which way, it was _still_ over 30 feet! He continued, his psychic powers again failing him, "You two could set up the security system! After all, it's not like I can take _everything_ with me."

Tara froze in shock.

The security… System…? The security system? Like the one she'd suggested? He was going to LISTEN to her about it? Have it set up to protect his work?

The young blonde squeed, jumping up and beginning to skip towards the plants. She knew JUST where to start. Joyfully, she flipped around so she was walking backwards. "C'mon, Doctor Porter! Let's get this thing going!"

Vivian looked between Tara and Doctor D. "Am I missing something?"

"Not really, I don't think." Tara's boss shrugged. "Just Missy being Missy."

Tara giggled and flipped back around. Deciding Vivian and Doctor Lipsky would follow in short order, she began to organize her thoughts on what she and Doctor Drew discussed. Even with that going through her head, she couldn't quite keep the marvel out of her mind.

Doctor D was going to give her credit on the Lorwardian tech breakdown!

He and Vivian were going to be working even _more_ closely together! Those children might actually happen!

The older blonde and Tara were going to be working on the security system!

And…

Doctor D was ACTUALLY going home for at least a few hours!

Another giggle burst from her mouth.

Crazy crazy day...


End file.
